Biggest U.S. military presence in Pakistan

With 2,000 military personnel and 30 helicopters at the three Pakistani airports of Jacobabad, Pasni and Dalbandin, this is the largest ever American military presence in Pakistan, a senior official said here on Saturday.

Dalbandin, barely 20 kilometres from the Afghanistan border, has become the operational base for the launching of troop operations inside the war-affected country, he said.

This is the biggest presence since the two countries' security ties in the late fifties, The News quoted military sources as confirming.

It was clear from the arrangements made for food, camping, and installation of radars and other technical instruments at Jacobabad and other places that the U.S. military presence in Pakistan will be for a fairly longer period than has been anticipated.

The report quoted Pakistani officials as saying that the United States army would be allowed to use ground facilities as part of Pakistan's commitment to extend intelligence, airspace and logistical facilities to the U.S. forces in their military campaign against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

Military analysts said the current U.S. military presence in Pakistan is the biggest. In the past, the U.S. military presence was largely restricted to intelligence or communication experts.

Analysts said that in 1963, no more than 500 U.S. military personnel were stationed in Pakistan when Field Marshal Ayub Khan allowed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to establish a massive electronic intelligence-gathering facility at Badaber, near Peshawar, which was shut down when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was foreign minister.

The U.S. used that facility against the former Soviet Union and China until 1968, when Ayub Khan succumbed to Soviet pressure to request the U.S. to shut down the Badaber base.

During the same peak period of the cold war, analysts said, Ayub Khan had allowed scores of U.S. military special forces' instructors to help raise the special services group (SSG), the commando unit of the Pakistan army.

The U.S. military instructors were also instrumental in raising the Pakistan army's parachute training school.

Except for a few years, the Pakistan army's SSG units have regularly conducted joint military exercises with the U.S. special forces who used to visit Pakistan for expeditions that have never lasted more than a month.

Informed sources said that besides a significant presence of military personnel, about three dozen U.S. army helicopters and at least six C-130 transport aircraft are operating from the three Pakistani airports.

At all three airports, the U.S. military has also installed extensive radar facilities that virtually cover the entire Pakistani airspace.

The U.S. military's air activity in the region is conducted in cooperation with the Pakistan air force and the civil aviation authority (CAA).

Sources in Quetta said in the event of full-scale ground operations by the U.S. special forces inside Afghanistan, Dalbandin, 170 miles south-west of Quetta and only 20 miles away from the Afghan border, would serve as a forward base for operations in southern Afghanistan, while the U.S.-led commando activities in northern Afghanistan would be conducted and monitored from the city of Termez in Uzbekistan.

While Dalbandin witnessed intense military activity on Friday, no extraordinary activity was seen either at Jacobabad or Pasni, where airport facilities were said to be in the control of U.S. military personnel.

Hundreds of U.S. army men are housed in 42 aircraft hangars at the Jacobabad airport, where the U.S. military has installed its own radar equipment at premises that were used in the past for air traffic control.

Jacobabad airbase, 300 miles north-east of Karachi, had seen a violent anti-U.S. protest demonstration on Sunday last. "Tons of food items, drinks and medicines that had been brought here by the U.S. military cargo planes give an indication that the U.S. military people were digging in for a long haul," said an official source speaking from Jacobabad.