US military officials confirmed today that more than 70 military advisers have been secretly working with Pakistan’s military as part of a “secret task force” training the Pakistani army and paramilitaries, as well as providing them with intelligence.

The program appears to have been running concurrently with a previously announced training program, which involved only the training of army instructors who would then be responsible for training Pakistani paramilitary forces. The secret program appears to have been much broader and involved direct training of forces as well as advisory roles.

The operation, overseen by both CENTCOM and SOCOM, also seems to have been ongoing even as the Pakistani government publicly spurned the offer for US training in protest of US air strikes which killed several members of the paramilitary Frontier Corps.

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