Just Shift West

February 24, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afghanistan, International Affairs, Military 

Special envoy Richard Holbrooke – who just returned from his trip to Pakistan- on Charlie Rose:

If you were to ask me the biggest thing we could do that would help everyone, it would be get the Pakistanis to redeploy more troops to the western border. Right now, they have 120,000 regular army and 50,000 frontier core, and far more, double or triple that on the east. If they could shift more to the west, that would be critically valuable, and not just shift them in regular army formations, but train them for counterinsurgency. They are a regular army trained since independence to defend against India. And like the American army in Vietnam, they’re looking backward to the past wars and not forward to the kind of unconventional counterinsurgency war that must be fought in the mountainous tribal areas of western Pakistan.

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