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US cuts military training programmes with Pakistan as Trump cracks down

United States (US) President Donald Trump’s administration has quietly started cutting scores of Pakistani officers from coveted training and educational programmes that have been a hallmark of bilateral military relations for more than a decade, officials say.

The move, which has not been previously reported, is one of the first known impacts from Trump’s decision this year to suspend US security assistance to Pakistan to compel it to crack down on militants.







“Lies and deceit”

In his first tweet of 2018, Trump slammed Pakistan, saying the country has rewarded past US aid with “nothing but lies and deceit.”

Washington announced plans in January to suspend up to roughly $2 billion in US security assistance to Pakistan. But weeks later, Pakistan’s foreign secretary was quoted by local media saying that Islamabad had been told the US would continue funding IMET programs. Officially allies in fighting terrorism, Pakistan and the United States have a complicated relationship, bound by Washington’s dependence on Pakistan to supply its troops in Afghanistan but plagued by accusations Islamabad is playing a double game.

Current and former US officials said Defense Secretary Jim Mattis argued against excluding Pakistani officers from IMET courses. “I am shocked… We worked so hard for this to be the one thing that got saved,” said a former US defence official, who was involved in the conversations.

The Pentagon declined to comment on internal government discussions, but Dana White, a Pentagon spokesperson, said Mattis
long believed in the value of the IMET programme as a way to build relations between foreign militaries. Senator Mushahid Hussain, chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, told Reuters that a US decision to cut off such exchanges would be counter-productive and push Pakistan’s military towards other countries.

“It is one of those silly, punitive measures that they have deployed,” said Hussain. Russia and Pakistan signed an agreement earlier this week that would allow for Pakistani military officers to train at Russian institutes.

IMET courses have been able to withstand poor relations between the two countries in the past, even after al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed in a US Navy SEAL raid in the town of Abbottabad in 2011. A NATO helicopter raid killed 28 Pakistani troops later that year in a friendly fire incident on the Afghan-Pakistan border.

Feldman said that after the raid, when relations were at a low point, the US limited large security assistance items, but made active efforts to continue the IMET programme.

Unintended Consequence

In the 1990’s former U.S. President George H.W. Bush refused to certify that Pakistan did not have nuclear weapons, triggering the so-called “Pressler Amendment” that required cutting off all military assistance. That included IMET courses. “The unintended consequence was we didn’t know a decade of the Pakistani military leadership as well, and therefore couldn’t engage as effectively with them when we needed to,” Feldman said.

Mattis, in private discussions within the government, had warned that excluding Pakistani officers from IMET courses could contribute to a similar situation in years to come, the former US defence official said. Pakistan had been the largest recipient of IMET between 2003 and 2017, according to the Security Assistance Monitor which tracks US assistance.

“You can advocate for cutting off everything else and this was the one thing we were not supposed to touch,” the former official said.

Courtesy: Express Tribune