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Islamabad: A plan to send US military advisers to train Pakistani border forces could begin as early as this summer. But the advisers, according to Western and Pakistani military officials, face serious challenges if they are to transform an ill-equipped paramilitary group into a front-line bulwark against terrorism.
Twenty-two American advisers are being tasked with training a cadre of officers in Pakistan's Frontier Corps in counterinsurgency and intelligence-gathering tactics, according to US officials in Pakistan familiar with the plan. The goal is to bolster the force's operations along the country's porous 1,500-mile-long border with Afghanistan, an area that has become a hotbed for the Taliban and Al Qaida, as well as their sympathisers.
But military analysts say that cultural and political fault lines within the Frontier Corps and Pakistan itself could prove the undoing of the US programme. The bulk of the force's rank-and-file troops are ethnic Pashtuns, many of whom are wary of going to battle against a Pashtun-dominated insurgency. Commanders, meanwhile, are regular army officers who often have little in common with their subordinates.
Long overdue
Major General Mohammad Alam Khattak, the top commander of the Frontier Corps, said the move to train and equip his 80,000-strong force was long overdue. He expressed frustration with a slow-moving military bureaucracy that has left his troops to fight an insurgency with World War II-era rifles. In a recent interview at a newly opened Pakistani-Afghan border intelligence centre, Khattak said his troops have been stymied by a doctrine of conventional warfare in an age of counterinsurgency.
"It's very difficult, but our force is an old force," Khattak said. "This is not the first eruption of an insurgency that we've seen. We are on a global geopolitical fault line."
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