The Davis affair, the JSOC & the Pakistan nukes ...

The JSOC influx into Pakistan occurred in two phases. The first was the ‘official’ one, in which a couple of hundred personnel came in as trainers for the Pakistan army’s SSG (its special forces) and the paramilitary Frontier Corps involved in operations against insurgents in the tribal areas...

The second phase of the JSOC influx occurred after the US decided to undertake a large, long-term aid program for Pakistan..... The Interior Ministry currently lists over 400 ‘special Americans’ (as it cutely calls them), but there may well be more...

The ‘official’ version of what they are doing is gathering counter-terrorism intelligence. But the ISI rank and file knew otherwise; they just couldn’t get the dominant US-friendly brass to do anything about it. Until Raymond Davis gunned down a couple of ISI auxiliaries on the streets of Lahore, and the US publicly came down like a ton of bricks to get him freed pronto, now, yesterday. That got Gen Kayani’s attention. And when he was told what Davis and his colleagues were really up to, that got action. For Kayani and the military establishment, the country’s nukes are the definitive red line.

Kayani’s stance, and the widespread public anger at the killings, caused the US-friendly faction to go to ground. The US-friendly foreign minister (his son had been one of Sen Kerry’s congressional aides until the media found out) suddenly discovered religion, and refused to certify Davis’s diplomatic immunity, losing his job for his pains. The ISI demanded the US provide a listing of all its agents in Pakistan. Several of them hurriedly left the country; one of them was arrested for an expired visa. On 23 February, Kayani held a meeting in Muscat, Oman, with Mullen, Mattis, Petraeus, and, significantly, Olson, chief of the Special Operations Command (under which JSOC works). My guess is that Kayani called the meeting to demand that JSOC back off the Pakistani nukes. After it, a US official said the discussion was “very candid”.

If Kayani and his fellow generals are really upset about the way in which this US-friendly government has facilitated JSOC’s activities inside Pakistan, and what it might do in the future, they may decide to effect a change. If that were to happen, the most likely scenario (because it would be the least messy) would be an internal party coup in which the current prime minister would be voted out and replaced, most likely by the born-again former foreign minister. If that can’t be engineered, then there are other messier ways of achieving the same goal; it would depend on how far Kayani decided to go.

We don’t know what caused Raymond Davis to pull out his Glock (or was it the Beretta?) and empty its magazine, but his act certainly seems to have started a chain of events that may well have significant consequences, changing many more lives than just those of the poor sods whom he gunned down, and their families."