DUSHANBE, February 13, 2015, Asia-Plus — The Embassy’s Office of Military Cooperation and the George C. Marshall Center for Security Studies hosted the third annual UN Peacekeeping Development Workshop in Dushanbe February 9-11, 2015.
The U.S. Embassy in Dushanbe says this year’s workshop brought together peacekeeping experts from the United States, Germany, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan to discuss national-level strategic issues related to development, training, and deployment of Tajik forces on a UN peacekeeping mission.
Kazakh and Mongolian representatives discussed their experiences in peacekeeping development, legislative considerations, and actual mission experiences on UN peacekeeping and Coalition stability operations.
The United States has assisted the Tajikistan Ministry of Defense’s peacekeeping capacity through the Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI) program since 2007. As part of this program, Tajikistan constituted a peacekeeping battalion in Dushanbe in 2010. With U.S. assistance, battalion units have deployed to multiple peacekeeping training exercises in Mongolia, Nepal, Kazakhstan, Germany, and the United States since 2012. The ongoing U.S.-Tajikistan GPOI partnership is currently valued at 6.6 million U.S. dollars for training, exercises, equipment, barracks refurbishment, and improvement of peacekeeping training facilities.
The Embassy’s Office of Military Cooperation conducts a variety of training, equipping, and partnership activities with the Tajik armed forces and security agencies, including counterterrorism, counternarcotics, border security, UN peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, demining, and other areas. OMC administers U.S. Central Command’s military partnership program, conducting approximately 80 events in Tajikistan and the United States each year. Since 2003, OMC has coordinated nearly $200 million of military assistance to Tajikistan.
