The U.S. military has 200 troops on the ground in Pakistan. That's about the double the previously-disclosed number of forces there. It's a whole lot more than the "no American troops in Pakistan" promised by special envoy Richard Holbrooke. And let's not even get into the number of U.S. intelligence operatives and security contractors on Pakistani soil.

The troop levels are one of a number of details that have emerged about the once-secret U.S. war in Pakistan since three American troops were killed yesterday by an improvised bomb. The New York Times reports that the soldiers were disguised in Pakistani clothing, and their vehicle was outfitted with radio-frequency jammers, meant to stop remotely-detonated bombs. "Still, the Taliban bomber was able to penetrate their cordon. In all 131 people were wounded, most of them girls who were students at a high school adjacent to the site of the suicide attack," the paper reports.

The military tells the* Times *that in addition to yesterday's deaths, "12 other service members had been killed in Pakistan since Sept. 11, 2001."

The slain U.S. troops have been referred to alternately as Special Operations forces as and as "civil affairs" troops – military nation-builders. It's quite possible they were both. American forces "have been quietly working on development projects" in Pakistan. It's supposedly part of an effort to train local forces in population-centric counterinsurgency. But the effort has been kept low-key, out of fears that it couldhand the Taliban a propaganda win. "Last summer, for example, the American military trainers helped distribute food and water in camps for the more than one million people displaced from the Swat Valley by the fighting [there]. But that American assistance, too, was kept quiet."

But keeping the American involvement secret – only to have it revealed in such dramatic fashion – may give militants an even bigger propaganda victory. “People are going to be very suspicious,” said Khalid Aziz, a former chief secretary of the North-West Frontier Province. “There is going to be big blowback in the media.”

[Photo: SOCOM]

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