‘Pak military threatens to cancel US training programme’

The uncertainty over the programme reflects how deeply scarred the US’ alliance with Pakistan, already strained, has been since the June 10 air strikes, Pakistani officials and Western diplomats were quoted by the New York Times as saying.

The USD 400 million training programme is intended to combat militancy by fielding a paramilitary force, called the Frontier Corps, from among the tribes that live in the border areas. It was a compromise between American and Pakistani officials looking for the least intrusive way to fortify security in an area where Pakistani government has rejected the idea of American soldiers and where even the regular Pakistani Army is often not welcome, the Times noted.

Ending or delaying the programme, which is already under way, would deny the US what little leverage it has in the tribal areas to combat a rising number of cross-border attacks from Pakistan into Afghanistan against American and NATO forces in 2008.

The United States military said the air strikes had been carried out in self-defence against militants who had attacked American forces in Afghanistan and then fled into Pakistan.

But the paper says the Pakistanis continue to dispute important parts of the American account.

“This is the first time the United States has deliberately targeted cooperating Pakistani forces,” Jehangir Karamat, a former chief of the Pakistani Army and a former ambassador to the United States, told the paper.

“There has been no statement by the United States that this was ‘friendly fire’ and that the intention was not to target Pakistani forces.”

The recriminations, the paper said, have exposed the underlying mistrust in the alliance, which has been held together in large part by the personal relationship between President Pervez Musharraf and his US counterpart George W Bush, Pakistani officials and diplomats said.

As the two men fade from power, the Times said the alliance is finding it difficult to quell the threat to the United States, Afghanistan and Pakistan from a growing array of Taliban and al-Qaeda cells that are dug into Pakistan’s tribal areas.

A senior Pakistani government official with long experience in military affairs, one of the two Pakistani officials who spoke with the paper, summed up the feeling of many in the Pakistani military, saying the strikes appeared deliberate despite American denials and intended to ‘punish’ Pakistan for not preventing Islamist militants from crossing into Afghanistan.

“Such types of incidents may affect the training programme by the United States for the Frontier Corps,” the spokesman for Pakistani Army, Maj Gen Athar Abbas, said on Monday.

In Washington, Pentagon press secretary, Geoff Morrell, expressed regret for the death of the Pakistani soldiers, but did not acknowledge any US culpability pending a probe by senior Pakistani, Afghan and American officers.

The American, Afghan and Pakistani militaries have agreed to hold a joint investigation into the strikes. That inquiry will now have to sort out the conflicting accounts in an extremely charged atmosphere.