“Where is the girl who stole the sunlight?
Burnt to a crisp, she’s gone without trace-
We treat them as deities, twinkling and bright
Though we know stars are only explosions in space.”
From The Angle of the Dangle by Bachchoo

The best place to lose a grain of sand is on the beach. The best place for Osama bin Laden to hide was in a compound close to the people who were supposedly hunting him down.
The latest conspiracy theory on his capture and execution is ingenuous and intriguing, maintaining that Bin Laden and his retinue were apprehended by the Americans altogether elsewhere and then smuggled into the compound in the military town of Abbottabad. The Americans then followed through with the staged landing of helicopters, the deliberate destruction of one of them to obviate the danger to the heroic American squad undertaking this operation and the enactment of the encounter in the bedroom, the execution and removal of the body. The theory acknowledges that a watery grave was the final resting place of OBL (fish be upon him!).
The conspiracy theory is ingenuous in its construction, disingenuous in intent. The world has so far conjectured that the Pakistani Army either colluded in Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad and that elements of the Armed Forces knew all along that they were sheltering the terrorist, or that the Pakistani Army had a failure of intelligence and really didn’t know that Bin Laden was sheltering in their backyard.
The Army Chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, has taken the hit. The Pakistani government pleads ignorance of Bin Laden’s presence and pleads guilty to a failure of intelligence. As the slogans on the rickshaws in Pakistani cities after the incident said (in various ways in Urdu and Punjabi): “Shoosh, be quiet, the Army is asleep!”
Either way, Pakistan’s American sponsors, or American allies in the international line-up against Islamist terror, will be displeased, sceptical and are even now asking hard questions. An internal enquiry, already enquiring, may come to some conclusions. These may contain some truth or they may prove to be a complete obfuscation, known in the enquiry trade as “a fix and a whitewash”.
The Pakistani government’s favoured option is inefficiency rather than connivance and the international double-cross it implies.
Our conspiracy theory overrides both. It’s the Americans who, suspicious of Pakistan’s feeble commitment to the anti-terror cause, set out through this Machiavellian plot to bring disgrace or suspicion upon the Pakistani Army. The Army is therefore neither guilty of double dealing nor of inefficiency. Allowing American helicopters to use its skies has been sanctioned before.
To her credit, Carey Schofield’s Inside the Pakistan Army, an account of the eight years that this English writer spent in the ranks and on the frontlines of conflict in that country, bravely starts her book with a bald statement of this dilemma. It must have been difficult for a writer, whose commitment to and affection for the institution, operations, personnel and spirit of the Pakistani Army is more than clear, to acknowledge in her introduction that she leans to the failure of intelligence option.
Inside the Pakistan Army is the first portrait of an institution which has governed the 63-year-old country for two-thirds of its existence and has to be seen as a chief bastion against the spread of Islamism in the South Asian theatre. It features interviews with the major players as the themes and narratives unfold. It ought to interest the specialist and the lay reader.
In a breathless introduction Schofield outlines the several paradoxes the Pakistani Army presents. Is it complicit with and encouraging terror or fighting it? Through several narratives of Army offensives against insurgents, mainly in the tribal regions, she comes to the compelling conclusion that several commanders of the Army — she boldly names them — approved of a policy of buying off the warlords of the insurgency.
Others, such as Gen. Faisal Alavi, whose tragic story she presents in detail, the head of the Special Forces, Pakistan’s Force de Frappe, believed that paying warlords would only strengthen them and reinforce their ambition of de facto rule over the tribal regions and territories. The danger of the establishment of a Shariac state was evidenced when the Islamists took over Swat and began seeping southwards, even threatening Islamabad.
Alavi, in pursuit of his conviction that the Army if better equipped, trained and led could and had to beat the insurgents, set up official co-operation with the US and the UK special forces, such as the SAS, making material and strategic alliances. While he was at this task briefly in Hereford, rival factions within the Army connived to have him sacked. They influenced Gen. Pervez Musharraf to believe that Alavi had in some serious way broken ranks and been disloyal. Moreover that he had brought the Army into disrepute through his liaison with a Pathan lady who seems to have been a “broad Generaliser”, so to speak. Mr Musharraf dismissed Alavi and soon after the protection afforded to him as SF commander was removed, he was ambushed and murdered.
Schofield’s account deliberately avoids the larger question of why Pakistan has not generated its own form of sustainable civil democracy. Is the Army the only competent and coherent body that can rule a country conceived as Pakistan was? Is that competence and coherence, not least through the evidence of this book itself, in question today?