Sri Lanka to train Pakistani army to fight Taliban

Telegraph UK ^ | 6:56PM BST 21 Aug 2009 | Dean Nelson

[Pan_Yan]

Sri Lanka is to train Pakistan army officers to fight the Taliban insurgency with lessons from its devastating defeat of the Tamil Tigers.

By Dean Nelson in Islamabad
Published: 6:56PM BST 21 Aug 2009

Colombo has been inundated with training requests since it finally put down the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elaam's (LTTE) 26-year rebellion in a final onslaught which claimed the lives of more than 10,000 civilians and left 300,000 displaced by the fighting.

The apparent accolade for the Sri Lankan forces will cause alarm among human rights groups which have accused the government in Colombo of war crimes over the shelling of civilians in a tiny "no-fire" zone in the last weeks of the war. The government denies the allegation.

Many of their artillery assaults were launched using aerial film footage from remote-controlled drones, which the Pakistan government is also to deploy in its own war on militants in the tribal areas along the Afghan border.

Now Sri Lanka is planning to set up new training centres in towns formerly held by the LTTE to train foreign forces in special operations.

[Pan_Yan]

I don't know what to think of this. Pakistan needs to do everything it can to gain stability but this has ramifications in several directions.

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

They will have to do some major house cleaning. Many in the officer ranks in Pakistan support Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban and Al Queda

[Pan_Yan]

The question is, what kind of government will Pakistan end up with. What little influence we had is almost gone. Obama “we area a muslim nation” speech did not help. At this point a strong man who can modernize the country and keep the fundamentalists in check might be best for them. The idealism of a democracy doesn’t always fit with an uneducated and tribal culture.

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

IMHO, I seriously think that the Taliban and Al Queda will end up with Pakistan and its nuclear weapons. It is going to be very difficult to root out all of the Taliban sympathizers in both the officer ranks and in the enlisted ranks. The Taliban are very popular in the Pakistani street.