The Pakistani Spectator

The three US soldiers who lost their lives on Wednesday in a school bombing incident in Dir Lower were members of the Army Special Forces, which has been training the Frontier Corps to improve its intelligence and combat tactics to effectively fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban insurgents in the Pak-Afghan tribal belt.

It is for the first time since the American occupation of Afghanistan in October 2001 that any US soldier has been killed in Pakistan, that too in a terrorist act. According to well informed diplomatic circles in Islamabad, the slain US soldiers were part of a 100-member strong special American military training unit which was dispatched to Pakistan in 2008 to raise a 1,000-member strong well-trained paramilitary commando unit which could conduct guerrilla operations against al-Qaeda and the Taliban militants active in the Pak-Afghan tribal belt and involved in cross-border ambushes against the US-led allied forces stationed in Afghanistan.

The military training programme was never officially announced by Pakistan to avoid a possible backlash by the opposition parties, which are opposed to the American military presence on the Pakistani territory. The US-funded training course for the largely under-equipped and under-trained Frontier Corps included both classroom and field sessions.

In the beginning, the American military trainers confined themselves to training compounds due to security concerns in Pakistan. However, they had now started accompanying Pakistani troops on special guerrilla operations against the Taliban and al-Qaeda militants, eventually leading to the Wednesday incident in Dir Lower which shares a border with Afghanistan and with the restive Swat district, where the Army had to carry out a massive military operation last year. The three slain US soldiers were travelling in a convoy with troops, journalists and officials to the opening of Koto Girls’ High School when the roadside bomb exploded.

The school was blown up in January 2009 and rebuilt with the help of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Dozens of girls’ school were set ablaze in Lower Dir area in 2008-2009 by the private army of Maulana Fazlullah, the fugitive chief of the Swat chapter of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan.

Though a Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) spokesman Azam Tariq has claimed responsibility for the bombing, saying the dead Americans belonged to the US security company Blackwater Worldwide - now known as Xe, military spokesman Maj-Gen Athar Abbas has said that the American soldiers were in Pakistan to train the Frontier Corps. Informed diplomatic circles in Islamabad say the American soldiers were part of a $100 million Pentagon-funded training programme which is meant to equip the Frontier Corps with new body armour, vehicles, and surveillance equipment, and plans to spend $75 million more during the next year. As per the programme, the Pentagon intended to spend around $400 million more in the next few years to train and equip the Frontier Corps. Sources say, besides dispatching American marines to train the Frontier Corps personnel, the Pentagon had also sent a special team of its Special Forces military advisers, communication experts, technical specialists and combat medics to help establish coordination centres on Pak-Afghan border so that the American and Pakistani officials could share intelligence about al-Qaeda and Taliban elements in and around the tribal areas.

By Amir Mir in The News