Young Pakistan Army Officers May Be Turning to Taliban

Jeff Stein, in CQ, here

"...A retired Pakistani general confided a deep worry to a friend in Washington (look at SST below, FB Ali) last week: that some young officers in Pakistan's regular army have become increasingly sympathetic over the past few years to the Taliban and their brand of radical Islam.

While he had no numbers or percentages of officers sympathetic to the Taliban, the possibility of any defections raises questions about the reliability of these officers during any sort of push against the Taliban by the Pakistani army.

Concern over the reliability of Pakistan's officer corps has heretofore focused on the ISI, or Inter-Services Intelligence service, which was wedded to CIA-backed fundamentalist Afghan rebels fighting to oust the Soviet Red Army during the 1980s. A faction of ISI officers is said to remain loyal to the fundamentalists.

The defection of regular army officers to fundamentalist rebels advancing through the Swat Valley toward Islamabad would add another wild card to various nightmare scenarios for Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation...."