Officer Leads Old Corps in New Role in Pakistan

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Maj. Gen. Tariq Khan, commander of Pakistan’s Frontier Corps paramilitary force, got some bad news the other day: The Pakistani Army needed its two helicopters back for a more urgent mission. Trouble was, they were the only two helicopters General Khan had that day — or any other day — to combat Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the country’s lawless tribal areas. “If the army needs their assets, we don’t get priority,” General Khan said of the transport and attack aircraft that the army lends him because his forces have none of their own.

So it goes for the Frontier Corps, a stepchild of the army that has to borrow most of its heavy weaponry, even as it increasingly finds itself on the front lines fighting Qaeda and Taliban operations that threaten American troops in Afghanistan and are increasingly destabilizing Pakistan.Still, with the 500,000-member Pakistani Army focused on its archenemy, India, and reluctant to embrace serious counterinsurgency training, the Frontier Corps, long maligned as poorly trained, ill equipped and at times in league with the insurgents, may yet be the country’s best immediate hope for countering a fast-spreading militancy.

Unlike the Punjabi-dominated army, the 60,000 troops in the Frontier Corps are largely drawn from Pashtun tribesmen who know the language and culture of the tribal areas, making it the most suitable force to combat an insurgency there, Pakistani and American military officials say. Enter General Khan, a portly, 52-year-old tank commander who made his name last year battling the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in South Waziristan. He took command of the corps seven months ago and has sought to drag it from its 19th-century border-patrol past into the 21st-century world of counterinsurgency.

The general, who once was Pakistan’s military representative at the United States Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., has already improved morale by raising salaries and expanding medical care to dependents. He has drafted a detailed plan to overhaul the corps, aiming to transform it into a more agile lightly armed force while also swelling its ranks by more than 10,000 to allow home leaves. He is an unusually progressive officer, a trait that has ruffled some feathers among his army brethren. In this conservative society, General Khan plans to offer women jobs as medics in rear-area field hospitals, freeing up male orderlies to fight. Pakistani and American officials say the Frontier Corps is already more effective now. The corps’s forces, fighting alongside regular army soldiers, have largely wrapped up operations against the Taliban in the Bajaur, Mohmand and Khyber areas of the tribal belt, the general said.
A new commando unit within the Frontier Corps has used information from the Central Intelligence Agency and other sources to kill or capture as many as 60 militants in the past seven months, a senior Pakistani military official said. “The results speak for themselves,” Owais Ahmed Ghani, the governor of the North-West Frontier Province, which includes the tribal areas, said in an interview. General Khan has strong support from the army chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. But many military analysts question whether General Khan will get the resources and backing to continue carrying out his changes. Moreover, some critics say, the recent Frontier Corps operations have not eliminated the Taliban threat, but just shunted it to neighboring areas.

“The Frontier Corps has shown improvement, but there’s still a long way to go,” said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a military analyst in Lahore. “The Taliban are entrenched and move quickly from one area to another.” The United States has thrown its support behind the corps. The Pentagon has spent more than $40 million to equip it with new body armor, vehicles, radios and surveillance equipment, with more in the pipeline. Over all, American officials have said that the United States could spend more than $400 million in the next several years to enhance the corps, including building a training base near Peshawar.

A United States Army Special Forces officer is assigned to the corps’s headquarters here to help share intelligence and coordinate operations with American forces across the border in Afghanistan. Last fall, about 30 American and British military instructors spent three months training some 120 senior enlisted corps troops in new weapons, combat tactics, communications and other technical skills. Those Pakistani troops will in turn train additional corps forces.

But a review of policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan by the National Security Council this year, under former President George W. Bush, concluded that the “train-the-trainer” approach was so indirect that it would take about 12 years to field an effective counterinsurgency force. “They’ve got a long way to go before you can rely on them,” Representative John F. Tierney, a Massachusetts Democrat, said of the corps. Mr. Tierney’s oversight subcommittee has conducted several hearings on Pakistan.

In an interview here at his headquarters, a massive 19th-century brick fortress built by the British, General Khan said that a relatively modest investment — say, $300 million — in sensors, night-fighting equipment, sniper rifles and helicopters would enable the corps to respond to specific threats within 90 minutes and “to go independently anywhere it wanted to go.” “It would change the dimension of the combat capacity of the Frontier Corps,” he said. “In the long run, it would reduce expenditures because you wouldn’t need so many troops.”

In the end, General Khan said the only long-term solution was to rebuild the tribal leadership structure that has been decimated by Taliban attacks, and then provide local tribal communities economic assistance and job training. “I consider the front-line force against the militants to be the tribes themselves,” General Khan said. “By bringing back tribal leadership, we’d be able to control this. But we have to have the wherewithal to protect those tribes.”

Posted in: Fighting Al Qaeda and Taliban,Pakistan