Some British army officer's critical musings about Pakistan were leaked to the media this week on the eve of the visit by President Pervez Musharraf. Neither Pakistan nor the British government were amused.
In June, a small delegation from Britain's Defence Academy travelled around Pakistan, meeting academics, military officers and politicians. Their discussions about how the country might emerge from its current time of troubles naturally touched on many sensitive areas.
It is a measure of how difficult Anglo-Pakistani relations have become that even the research of an officer on an academic posting could have such an effect
When they got back to their offices at Shrivenham in Wiltshire one of the team, an officer on attachment to the academy who had previously served in a sensitive post liaising with the Americans on counter-terrorist matters, set down the team's findings.
The document, several pages long, runs through the "fix" that President Pervez Musharraf is in - trying to square international pressures with rising Islamic sentiment - before looking at the Western, Afghan, US and UK dilemmas.
"Pakistan is existing on the edge of chaos," he writes, arguing that Gen Musharraf does not stand for stability but rather that a move to civilian rule "might in fact be the only way to retain and improve stability, avoiding collapse and anarchy". ...
The British officer considers 2007 to be "the crunch year", in which international pressure for a move to civilian rule will collide with the Pakistani military's attempts to retain control of the country through their Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and political proxies.
Many Pakistani commentators have long suggested that the ISI has been used to maintain the system of military rule by exporting Islamic militancy to Kashmir and Afghanistan.
"Indirectly", the British officer agrees, "Pakistan (through the ISI) has been supporting terrorism and extremism." He suggests that the Americans are fed up with this state of affairs and may withdraw their funding in order to chase Gen Musharraf from office.
