"Lieutenant Seagoon," barked the commanding officer. "We have it on good authority from our milkman that the besieged garrison at Fort Thud on the frontier of Waziristan has lost its Union Jack."
"You mean our troops don't know what side they're on?" replied Seagoon in "Shifting Sands", a 1957 episode of the seminal BBC radio comedy "The Goon Show" set in the days of the British Raj.
"They know which side they're on, they just can't prove it!" countered the officer, Grytpype-Thyne, in Peter Sellers' best stiff-upper-lip accent.
Seagoon: "Gad! It must be hell out there."
Half a century on, in the real world, it still is. Loony though the sketch is, it bears odd parallels to often heated exchanges between Pakistani, US and Afghan forces hunting al Qaeda and Taleban insurgents along the rugged border between Afghanistan and Pakistan's restive tribal region of Waziristan.
Nearly 50 US troops have been killed on the Afghan side this year, while the Pakistan Army has lost almost 270 men and killed more than 350 militants since deploying to the region in late 2001.
The dangers posed by friendly fire and unauthorised incursions only make it worse.
At the headquarters of the Pakistan Army's 11th Corps in Peshawar, Lieutenant-General Safdar Hussain said he finally blew his top this summer when artillery fire from US coalition forces exploded in the vicinity of his own troops.
"I told them straight: "Next time I'll shoot at you," Hussain, said.
Indeed, one Afghan soldier was shot dead by Pakistani troops in the Angor Adda area of South Waziristan in recent months, forcing a US soldier to shout out to stop the firing.
"They trespassed into my territory and, despite a warning shot, they kept penetrating into Pakistani territory and we had no option but to shoot to kill," Hussain said.
Soldiers in the frontier region have never known where the next shot might come from, which the Goons also touched upon with absurdist poignancy.
"Through the long night the Waziris attacked, firing their bullets from the hidden positions inside their rifle barrels."
It's not just ground violations and friendly fire that peeves Pakistan. US aircraft loop over the border with such frequency that Hussain doubted it is inadvertent, although the number of incidents has tailed off since Pakistan protested in August at a meeting of the Tripartite Commission on border security.
Hussain said he gave the US-led coalition forces a clear message: "You take care of your area. We are quite capable of taking care of our area."
A US Army spokesman in Kabul said he could not speak about the past but added that there were concerted efforts to improve communications on the ground in order to avoid problems.
"We do everything in our power to co-ordinate with the Pakistan military. But we will respond in kind to enemy firing on us from across the border. The Pakistan military commanders understand that," Colonel James Yonts said.
On July 14, US fire from Afghanistan killed 24 suspected militants near Lawara Mandi, a North Waziristan village. Thousands of tribesmen protested at funerals for the dead, and some clerics never miss a chance to stoke bad feeling.
"If the Pakistan government gives us permission, we are ready to wipe out the Americans from Afghanistan, because they are enemies of Islam," Maulana Abdul Khaliq told followers at Madrasa Gulshan-e-Ilm in Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan. Such incidents make it harder to keep a lid on sentiment in North Waziristan, where the Pakistan Army is trying to fight terrorism through stealth rather than the direct offensives that led to heavy casualties in South Waziristan last year.
About 80,000 Pakistani troops are deployed along the frontier and Pakistani border posts easily outnumber those established by the 20,000-strong US-led coalition force and Afghan army.
"The upsurge in Afghanistan - this is because of lack of grip by the coalition forces and Afghan National Army," said Hussain. Stung by complaints that Pakistan could have done more to stop the Taleban this summer, President Pervez Musharraf proposed erecting a fence along parts of the 2,400-km (1,500-mile) border when he met US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice this month.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai says it is impractical. The frontier, known as the Durand Line after the colonial administrator who drew the line on a map separating British India from Afghanistan in the 19th Century, is disputed.
Hussain said part of the problem is that Afghan troops use inaccurate Russian maps even though, if they do not trust Pakistani maps, they could refer to global positioning systems.
The disorientating qualities of Waziristan's desert and mountains is the stuff Goons' material was made of.
Lieutenant Seagoon: "Sorry I'm late, gentlemen, but your fort is 20 miles further north than it says on the map."
Colonel Chinstrap: "Twenty miles north? Then it's happened again. This fort was built on shifting sands..."
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