Pakistani Counterinsurgency Strategy Turns on Better Trained Frontier Corp.

It often goes unremarked but politics is nothing more than the show of armed, military might sublimated through votes and caucuses.  So it is somewhat odd that the majority of the coverage of Pakistani politics related to the so-called ‘War on Terror’ is principally concerned with terrorism and the growing insurgency of the Tehrik e- Taliban.

It is almost refreshing that Eric Schmitt and Jane Perlez, writing for the New York Times, have refocused the attention of the interested reader on the fact that the U.S. is training and arming the Pakistani military to turn around and fight its own fights against the Taliban. Moreover, along with U.S. assistance, the Pakistani military is ramping up its own hardened training of border forces to face off against militants in the tribal region between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

This move anticipates the strong likelihood that any settled peace in Pakistan between the Pashtun Taliban and Islamabad will stem in large measure from a counterinsurgency strategy that will then shift to political negotiation. (The counterinsurgency tactic is, then, leverage for the maximum concessions from the opposing interlocut0r.)

Schmitt and Perlez writes: “The [military] personnel training is just one piece of what is now a multipronged relationship. With combating Al Qaeda and the Taliban now the overriding priority, the United States provides Pakistan with a wide array of weapons, shares intelligence about the militants, and has given it more than $10 billion toward the cost of deploying nearly 150,000 troops in and around the border areas since 2001 — with the promise of much more to come.”

This smacks of  counterinsurgency training– close combat on hill-tops and trenches; on the side of a road, across a brick wall.

“By urging Pakistan to embrace counterinsurgency training, the United States is trying to steer the Pakistani Army toward spending more resources against what Washington believes is Pakistan’s main enemy, the Taliban and Al Qaeda, rather than devoting almost the entire military effort against India, American officials said. Central to this approach is an array of training that the Americans tailor to what Pakistani says it needs for the Frontier Corps, its conventional army and its Special Operations forces.”

Going forward everything will turn on the Pakistani military retention strategy of the finest soldiers in all ranks and divisions within the Armed Forces.  As highlighted in the piece, salaries for the Frontier Corp has quadrupled while staff assistance  has become a priority.

Why such a drastic turn toward a human resources strategy?  Because ,as a officer in the Army remarks, with striking, deadening precision, the enemy have been training for 20 years, ginning up support within their ranks, soaking in camaraderie.  The Frontier Corp and the rest of the military have less than the span of a heart beat to pull off a miracle and fight a winning fight in their own land.