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Aarwaa · #**146** Friday, January 25, 2008

US to step up training of Pak forces

* Five-year plan will involve $150 million from US and $1.25 billion from Pakistan
* US officials say insurgents’ focus has shifted from Afghanistan to Pakistan

Daily Times Monitor

LAHORE: The US military is planning to significantly expand and accelerate its counterinsurgency training and provision of equipment for armed forces this year as part of a five-year, $2 billion US-Pakistani effort to help stabilise the country, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.

Quoting senior US and Pakistani officials, the newspaper report said the enhanced cooperation would include US military assistance toward counterinsurgency training, technical gear and assistance to improve the Pakistani military’s intelligence gathering and its air and ground mobility. If requested by Pakistan, it could also involve US Special Operations Forces working with the Pakistani military as it launches “more aggressive” actions against insurgents in the northwest Tribal Areas, the Post reported Ambassador Dell L Dailey, the State Department’s counter-terrorism coordinator, as saying.

Contribution: The plan will involve about $150 million from the US each year, Dailey was quoted as telling defence reporters on Tuesday. In turn, Pakistan will contribute $1.25 billion to the plan over five years, the paper said referring to State Department figures.

“The effort comes amid criticism from Congress that the billions of dollars the Bush administration has already spent on Pakistani security efforts have produced poor results...Despite the aid, the insurgency of extremists in Pakistan has grown,” the Post said. “It has not worked,” the paper quoted Rick Barton of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies as saying.

Insurgency coming to Pakistan: US officials, according to the Post, said the new strategy was critical, as insurgents once focused on had turned inward to challenge the Pakistani government.

“The plan to counter insurgents is to work with the Pakistanis to share intelligence, increase cross-border cooperation between ourselves, the Afghans and the Pakistanis, and to work with Pakistan’s military to increase their capability,” Admiral William Fallon, the top US commander for the Middle East, told The Washington Post this week.

“Pakistan’s military recognises the seriousness of the internal insurgent problem,” Fallon, who arrived in Pakistan on Tuesday to meet with military leaders, told the Post.

According to the paper, senior military officials place high hopes on the new Chief of Army Staff, Ashfaq Kayani. The Post said Kayani must also change the army’s traditional emphasis on . “We trained for set piece battles in the plains of Pakistan and India . . . we need more detailed counterinsurgency training,” it reported Mahmud Ali Durrani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the US, as saying.

“Much of the increased US military cooperation will be tailored to improve the counterinsurgency operations of the Pakistani military and the Frontier Corps, a large but ill-equipped force that has suffered most of the government’s combat casualties in the Tribal Areas,” according to the Post.

The US military is planning to expand the number of trainers for the FC, possibly including contractors or allied forces, and is also seeking to tap into $37 million in counter-terrorism funds for that effort, the paper reported while quoting US officials. This increased cooperation would both expand a multiyear US counterinsurgency plan that is being implemented, with $157 million in aid planned for 2008 and more US contract and Special Forces trainers expected to arrive in Pakistan this spring, the Post quoted US officials as saying.