U.S. advisers secretly training Pakistani forces

BARA, PAKISTAN - More than 70 U.S. military advisers and technical specialists have been working secretly in Pakistan to help its armed forces battle Al-Qaida and the Taliban in the country's lawless tribal areas, U.S. military officials said.

The Americans are mostly Army Special Forces soldiers who are training Pakistani army and paramilitary troops, providing them with intelligence and advising on combat tactics, the officials said. They do not conduct combat operations, the officials added.

They make up a secret task force, overseen by the U.S. Central Command and Special Operations Command. It started last summer, with the support of Pakistan's government and military, in an effort to root out Al-Qaida and Taliban operations that threaten U.S. troops in Afghanistan and increasingly are destabilizing Pakistan. It is a much larger and more ambitious effort than either country has acknowledged.

The Pentagon previously had said about two dozen U.S. trainers worked in Pakistan late last year.

Officials from Pakistan and the United States agreed to disclose some details about the military advisers and enhanced intelligence-sharing to help dispel impressions that continuing U.S. missile strikes against militants in Pakistani tribal areas were thwarting broader efforts to combat a common enemy.

They said that the U.S. effort is beginning to pay dividends.

A new Pakistani commando unit within the Frontier Corps paramilitary force has used information from the CIA and other sources to kill or capture as many as 60 militants in the past seven months, including at least five high-ranking commanders, a senior Pakistani military official said. Four weeks ago, the commandos captured a Saudi militant linked to Al-Qaida in Bara, a town in the Khyber Agency, one of the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan.

Yet the main commanders of the Pakistani Taliban, including its leader, Baitullah Mehsud, and its leader in the Swat region, Maulana Fazlullah, remain at large.

The program -- and the possibility of expanding it -- is expected to be discussed when the chief of the Pakistani army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, visits Washington this week as part of a review of U.S. policy in Afghanistan and the surrounding region.