IMO, this incident needs to be investigated. Were adequate precautions not taken, those responsible should be held accountable. Whether any commanders or troops are discharged dishonorably is irrelevant. Of course, if U.S. or NATO forces came under fire, then that's an entirely different matter. If proper precautions were undertaken and an accident took place, that's also an entirely different matter.
However, in the larger context, I do believe a lack of strategic foresight has contributed to incidents such as the current one, because alternatives would reduce interaction and possible confrontations between U.S./NATO and Pakistani forces. Pakistan is continuing to evolve into a failed state. Its government lacks legitimacy among large segments of its population. It has proved to be unreliable in bilateral relations. Nevertheless, the underlying U.S. policy assumption has been to treat Pakistan as an ally even as it is both unwilling and unable to play the role of an ally.
Last spring, I raised a number of questions concerning U.S.-Pakistan relations. Those questions were:
• Will the U.S. military have the strategic foresight to identify and begin to phase-in alternative supply routes that reduce dependence on Pakistan and reduce that country’s ability to exploit the ill-advised single route approach over which it can exact disproportionate leverage?
• Will the U.S. military develop a plan to secure or destroy Pakistan's nuclear weapons and/or deter the proliferation of such weapons, should such a nightmare situation become necessary?
• Will the U.S. government have the strategic foresight to deepen bilateral relations with India and to intensify relationship building with Afghanistan’s neighboring states (excluding Iran and Pakistan) so as to offset the costs of the worsening relationship with Pakistan (should that trajectory continue) and, if necessary, establish and sustain a regional balance of power that neither Iran nor Pakistan could exploit?
• Will the U.S. government have the strategic foresight to link continued assistance to Pakistan to concrete conduct and cooperation and, absent that conduct, will it have the courage to draw down the assistance, even as an increasingly uncooperative Pakistan contributes a diminishing minimum of cooperation to try to hang onto the foreign aid?
IMO, the growing evidence, based on continuing approaches is that the response to the first question is negative. No such effort has been made to any meaningful attempt. If it has, failure to implement it is highly problematic.
The response to the second question is perhaps negative as well. The underlying assumption remains that Pakistan is an ally. Hence, the very difficult effort of developing a course of action to deal with the unpleasant reality that Pakistan is not exactly an ally may well have been put off. After all, if the far easier logistics challenge (cutting deals with Russia/Russian allies for alternative routes, resorting to an air bridge ala the Berlin Airlift, etc.) has not been addressed, it is difficult to envision the greater challenge of developing a contingency plan for Pakistan's nuclear arsenal being tackled. The persistent lack of contingency plans for Iraq and Afghanistan also reduce confidence in such contingency plans being developed.
The response to the third question appears to be somewhat positive. The U.S. has been moving to strengthen bilateral ties with India. IMO, that process should be maintained and accelerated.
The response to the fourth question is negative. The U.S. has not tied continued aid to Pakistan to Pakistan's conduct. Some in Congress have suggested such a move, but Congress has not acted legislatively when it came to the recent foreign aid appropriations process to attach such terms.
As noted previously, ideally, the bilateral relationship can still be mended. However, that may well be a difficult challenge, especially if Pakistan continues to slide toward failed state status whereby an ever weaker regime runs larger risks in a bid to survive. In any case, the U.S. should have a coherent strategy in place should the relationship continue to deteriorate or even collapse. Otherwise, its ability to secure its goals and safeguard its regional interests could be compromised. IMO, with the exception of the bilateral relationship to India, serious effort toward devising such a strategy has yet to be undertaken. The lack of such a strategy has likely hurt U.S. interests and might well have contributed to a business as usual context in which the most recent tragedy took place, as more interactions create more opportunities for accidents or worse.