A small contingent of U.S. military instructors have begun a training program scheme aimed at turning Pakistan’s Frontier Corps into an effective counter-insurgency force, a U.S. military official said Thursday.
About 25 U.S. military personnel last week began training Pakistani counterparts at a location in Pakistan outside the troubled tribal areas where the Frontier Corps operates, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"It has started. It is a train-the-trainer mission," the official said, emphasizing that the Americans would not directly train the Frontier Corps, but only their Pakistani army instructors.
Recruited from the tribal areas and led by Pakistani army officiers, the 80,000-member Frontier Corps historically has been poorly armed and trained.
The aim is "basically to train the Frontier Corps in counter-insurgency warfare to make them more effective in the tribal areas," the official said.
The politically sensitive program had been stalled for months by negotiations between the US and Pakistani military. The official attributed the delay to difficulties in getting the facilities needed to conduct the training.
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