US admits ‘200 troops’ on the ground in Pakistan

AfPak border

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Last December, when Washington’s Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, categorically denied that the US had troops on Pakistani soil, we at intelNews were among some who refused to believe him. Instead, we referred readers to earlier revelations in The New York Times that US military forces were already secretly operating in Pakistan, and that more than 70 US “military advisers […] and technical specialists” were embedded with Pakistan’s special forces in the remote areas bordering Afghanistan. Those in the know are aware that embedded US troops have operated in Pakistan since at least February of 2008, no matter what Holbrooke claims. It took the deaths of three of these American soldiers, in a suicide attack by Pakistani Taliban, last week, for American officials to begin to admit that US troops are indeed operating inside Pakistan. What is more, The Times disclosed that the three US Special Forces troops were killed wearing Pakistani army uniforms, and they were apparently not the first US troops to lose their lives on Pakistani soil since 9/11: nine others have preceded them. Writing for Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog, Noach Shachtman takes this opportunity to ask the obvious question: “Now can we start treating this [thing in Pakistan] like [the] real war” that it is? Can we? Pretty please?