Quote:
Originally Posted by Agnostic Muslim
I agree with that. In fact I made a similar argument regarding the FC. My contention was that despite all the criticism heaped upon it - the lack of equipment, training, pay, benefits etc. the force has still held together remarkably well in the face of fierce militant assaults and the atrocities (torture, videotaped beheadings and executions) and casualties inflicted upon them.
There have been a few hundred desertions, but insignificant taking into account the overall force. That the force has held together despite these odds indicates that there already is a strong sense of identity and loyalty to an entity beyond merely the Tribe.
Or it may be that the loyalty to tribe and faith is still paramount, but the organization of the FC has allowed for it understand the danger posed by an ideology or organization (Taliban), working against the interests of the State (Pakistan, Pakistan supported Tribal Systems), to the Tribe and faith as they know it.
If the force can be expanded, better trained, better equipped and provided with better pay and benefits, with its own officer schools and academies (rather than secondment from the Pakistan Army), I see that loyalty to State over Tribe only increasing and strengthening, as loyalty to State provides the community with tangible benefits over being "autonomous".
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Agnostic Muslim
The Pakistani Frontier Corps organization doesn't work that way; it wasn't designed to work that way; nor can it be made to work that way except by scrapping the whole organization and retaining only its name for a completely differently organized force. The first two points are facts, the third point is an opinion founded on observation of similar cases-studies:
1. The Frontier Corps recruits on tribal basis, as did almost all of its predecessor organizations in the past. Take for example the Khyber Rifles - perhaps the most famous unit of the PFC - which recruits its ORs almost exclusively from the Afridis and allied tribes living near the Khyber Pass*. For most of them, service in the Khyber Rifles only reinforces their regional and tribal ties. Further they are mostly tasked for local duties, unlike regular Army units. For the regular Army regiments, even when drawn from a single ethnic group, Pakistan-wide deployments means that they actually break out of their regional cocoon (invariably the small-village mindedness of North Jehlum). For the PFC it is not so.
2. The Frontier Corps is not designed to work the way your wish/conjecture of how it is working either, as it is a continuation of a force addressing much older priorities than you care to give credit for. The component units of the PFC were drawn primarily from the tribes they worked around so that the tribes will have some modern military training to take on the Russians/Soviets when the Frontier was run over. It was hence the utmost priority to keep good ties with tribes and the religious leaders on whom the inevitable insurgency would depend; even if it meant turning a blind-eye to the depredations of the more powerful tribes and mullahs. The practice of embedding regular military officers on detachment - be they from British Indian Army then, or Pakistani Army now - was also based on good military sense.
3. When the entire design, structure, recruitment, training, indoctrination and motivation of a force is fundamentally geared towards starting an insurgency rather than countering an insurgency AND its loyalty in the campaign is questionable, there is no painless way of correcting the course.
Oh, and here at least the criticism of the Frontier Corps is not of its lack of equipment, training, pay or benefits; it is the lack of will to fight, cowardice and treachery. Lack of will
can be fixed with more equipment, training, pay etc.; cowardice
may be fixed by the same; treachery
should not be attempted to be fixed. There has been treachery - witness the murder of the US Army MAJ earlier this year by a PFC guard as he came out of a US-Pak border conference; treachery is not insignificant no matter how large the overall force.
* OK, I couldn't resist this: In one of the Anglo-Afghan Wars the Afridis of the Khyber Rifles defected en masse to the Afghans, wherein the local commissioner recruited retiring soldiers of the British Indian Army to fill the Khyber Rifles temporarily. The obvious Khukris on the Khyber Rifles' insignia comes from that short period of time when it was almost entirely staffed by Gurkhas. Wikipedia mistakenly attributes it as an "Afghan Knife"; anyone remotely familiar with an Afghan/Khyber choori would no doubt be flummoxed by it.