Special Forces troops tend to think they carry the fate of the world in their rucksacks.

In Pakistan, they may be right.

Years from now we may look back at the "secret" deployment of some 70 U.S. military advisers to Pakistan as a turning point in the global war on terrorism, the moment when a daring idea and brilliant execution snatched victory from a looming disaster.

Or the opposite: a Pakistani version of Ia Drang, the 1965 battle when North Vietnamese regulars showed they could go toe-to-toe with American troops, signaling a long, devastating and -- in that case -- losing war.

Make no mistake about it: Pakistan hangs in the balance.

It's intermittently amazing to me that we managed to conquer Japan and Germany in four-plus years (with no small help from the Russians, of course), yet after almost twice that time we haven't been able to crush a raggedy band of 8th-century minded terrorists in an area no bigger than Montana.

We didn't even have a plan, as it turned out, as late as last spring, almost seven years after al Qaeda launched big hits on us from its mountain redoubts on the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. Today it's said to be ensconced in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, loosely controlled by Islamabad in a regional autonomy arrangement.

CIA ground teams operating on the vaguely determined Afghan-Pakistan frontier are well aware of  the presidential executive order banning assassinations, says a recent returnee from the region's fighting.

The problem is that al Qaeda suspects and their Taliban supporters don't wear what's normally considered a uniform, which puts American hit teams in potential legal jeopardy for violating Executive Order 12333, which bans the CIA from carrying out assassinations.

The order was signed by President Reagan in 1981 following congressional investigations into alleged CIA assassination plots targeting foreign leaders.

So the teams in Afghanistan have a simple rule of thumb:  If the target "looks military," i.e., carrying a weapon or walking in the company of other armed men, he's a legitimate target.

If there's an absence of same, the target is considered a civilian, and the decision gets bucked up the chain of command for further deliberation.

Of course, this may be a distinction without a difference. The CIA-administered Predator drones have been targeting al Qaeda "civilians" for some time now.

On Sept. 17, 2001, President Bush said Osama bin Laden was "wanted dead or alive," prompting a flurry of questions about U.S. assassination policy.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said that E.O.12333 remained in effect, The Washington Post reported at the time, noting that Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter had issued their own executive orders on the subject, numbers 11905 and 12306, respectively.

While the directives forbid assassination, they do not define the term, Post reporter Barton Gellman noted.

Fleischer declined four times to interpret the text, he reported.

"I'm going to just repeat my words and others will figure out the exact implications of them, but it does not inhibit the nation's ability to act in self-defense," Fleischer said.

UPDATE: The CIA ground team veteran had emphasized that the agency and its operatives took care to operate within the law, a point that could have been made more clear in the first version of this story.

A CIA spokesman, for example, thought it had portrayed the agency badly. 

"This report is truly bizarre, an apparent part of the cottage industry dedicated to portraying the agency as careless and slapdash," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said late Thursday.

Barack Obama sounds almost Rumsfeldian when he talks about a couple brigades -- about 7,000 troops -- being enough to save our bacon in Afghanistan. The Pentagon says it wants three, which also could turn out to be far from adequate.

"A lot of intelligence -- much of it unclassified and possible to discuss here -- indicated that senior Afghan officials were deeply involved in the narcotics trade. Narco-traffickers were buying off hundreds of police chiefs, judges and other officials. Narco-corruption went to the top of the Afghan government. The attorney general, Abdul Jabbar Sabit, a fiery Pashtun who had begun a self-described "jihad against corruption," (said)  he had a list of more than 20 senior Afghan officials who were deeply corrupt -- some tied to the narcotics trade. He added that President Karzai -- also a Pashtun -- had directed him, for political reasons, not to prosecute any of these people."