What began on 9 January at the NCTC
The 13th bilateral Pakistan-US joint counter-terrorism exercise — ‘Inspired Gambit 2026’ — began on Friday 9 January 2026 at the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) in Pabbi near Kharian, with the opening ceremony attended by officials from both armies, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) press release on the exercise, carried by Dawn on Saturday, said. The exercise is scheduled to run for two weeks and is built around a counter-terrorism domain, with “professional contingents from the armies of Pakistan and the US” taking part on each side.
According to the ISPR statement, the drill is “aimed at enhancing mutual understanding and interoperability through the sharing of counterterrorism experiences, while further refining tactics, techniques, and procedures essential for effective CT operations”. The two-week programme places “emphasis … on marksmanship skills during urban warfare, as well as on understanding each other’s operational doctrines and best practices”, and ISPR described the exercise as of “vital importance”, pointing to its role in “addressing evolving security challenges, improving professional military standards, and strengthening the capacity of both forces to operate in complex counter-terrorism environments”.
The same Dawn archive for 10 January 2026 carried separately the Pakistan Navy’s LY-80N surface-to-air missile test in the north Arabian Sea, the Iraqi Air Force Commander’s expression of “keen interest” in JF-17 Thunder jets during ACM Zaheer Ahmed Baber Sidhu’s Iraq visit, and Dawn’s 10 January survey of Pakistan arms-export deals since the May 2025 conflict with India. Inspired Gambit 2026 was, in Dawn’s framing of the day, the third of the day’s three Pakistan-US–connected security developments alongside a separate PAF-in-Iraq export-interests story and a separate post-May 2025 arms-export survey.
Where the exercise is being held
ISPR’s 10 January statement said the exercise is being held at the National Counter Terrorism Centre in Pabbi, near Kharian. Dawn carried an editorial correction the same day saying the earlier version of its story had placed the drill “incorrectly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Pabbi tehsil”. The Pabbi of the ISPR-cleared correction is the village near Kharian in Punjab’s Gujrat district, where the NCTC is the Pakistan Army’s principal counter-terrorism training hub and the country’s designated centre of excellence for the National Action Plan’s counter-terrorism implementation.
The Kharian-Pabbi complex is a long-standing Pakistan Army cantonment and training area, and the NCTC was built specifically as a dedicated facility to standardise counter-terrorism training across the Pakistan Army, the paramilitary Rangers, the Frontier Corps and the country’s other security forces. Pakistan and the United States have used the NCTC, and earlier counter-terrorism schools in the same region, as the venue for several of the bilateral exercises in the long-running Inspired Gambit series, and the series has historically alternated between Pakistani and US venues. The 2026 edition is the 13th in the series, according to the ISPR statement, and is being held entirely on the Pakistani side at the NCTC.
What “Inspired Gambit” has historically covered
Inspired Gambit is the bilateral Pakistan-US army counter-terrorism exercise series the two countries have run under slightly different names since the early 2000s. The series is one of the longest-running US-Pakistan military engagement programmes and is run by US Army Central (USARCENT) on the US side and by the Pakistan Army’s infantry directorate on the Pakistani side. The Wikipedia article on the National Counter Terrorism Centre records that the NCTC has hosted the bulk of the Pakistan Army’s bilateral counter-terrorism exercises since the early 2010s and that the drills alternate between urban-warfare training, close-quarters marksmanship, joint IED-handling procedures, and hostage-rescue scenarios. The series has historically been preserved at full operational tempo through periods of strain in the wider bilateral relationship, and its focus has consistently been on the counter-terrorism tactics, techniques and procedures that both armies use in their respective theatres of operations in the AfPak border region and the wider South and Central Asian counter-terror landscape.
What the exercise is designed to demonstrate
ISPR’s framing of the exercise centred on operational interoperability and on the alignment of doctrines between the two armies at a moment when both are operating in the same counter-terrorism environment. The statement used the standard ISPR language for capability-building exercises rather than for one-off drills: “addressing evolving security challenges”, “improving professional military standards”, and “strengthening the capacity of both forces to operate in complex counter-terrorism environments”. The urban-warfare and marksmanship focus of Inspired Gambit 2026 is consistent with the broader Pakistan Army counter-terrorism curriculum that the DG ISPR, Lt Gen Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, set out at his extended 6 January 2026 end-of-year press conference in Rawalpindi, where he recorded 5,397 terror incidents and 2,597 militants killed across Pakistan in 2025, with 71 per cent of the incidents in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and 29 per cent in Balochistan. The exercise is also a signal that the bilateral training programme has not been downgraded by the political and economic strains in the wider US-Pakistan relationship, and the ISPR statement did not name the US contingent or the unit-level participants.
What is verified on 9-10 January
Three core facts about Inspired Gambit 2026 are independently anchored by the ISPR statement and the Dawn report. The ISPR statement, as carried by Dawn on 10 January, identifies the exercise as the 13th in the Pakistan-US bilateral joint counter-terrorism series, names the venue as the National Counter Terrorism Centre in Pabbi near Kharian, dates the start of the exercise as Friday 9 January 2026, and sets the duration at two weeks. The Dawn article also carried an editorial correction the same day clarifying that the Pabbi of the exercise is the village near Kharian in Punjab, and not the Pabbi tehsil in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. No independent wire-side reporting on the exercise was in the English-language Pakistan press reviewed on 10 January; the 13th Inspired Gambit’s announcement came principally through the ISPR-Dawn channel that has been the standard route for bilateral military exercises for the past decade.
What remained open on 10 January
Several questions were not answered by the day’s coverage. ISPR did not identify the size of the US contingent, the specific US Army unit that deployed to Pakistan, the names of the senior officers who attended the opening ceremony, or the specific urban-warfare ranges at the NCTC being used. The statement did not say whether the exercise would include unmanned aerial systems, counter-drone operations, or any cyber or electronic-warfare layer, and it did not say whether any part of the drill would be observed by the National Counter Terrorism Authority (NACTA), the civilian counter-terrorism coordination body that the DG ISPR has separately named as the lead civilian coordinator of the National Action Plan. Reuters, AP, AFP and BBC coverage of the exercise was not in the day’s English-language Pakistan coverage reviewed.
Why the exercise matters for Pakistan
For Pakistan, Inspired Gambit 2026 sits inside a December 2025-January 2026 counter-terrorism reporting arc that began with the DG ISPR’s 6 January full-year briefing and runs through the Pakistan Navy’s 10 January LY-80N firing in the north Arabian Sea and the same day’s Iraqi Air Force interest in the JF-17. Each service had a separate capability-development statement on the same Saturday, and the Army’s contribution was a bilateral exercise rather than a unilateral demonstration. The 13th edition’s urban-warfare curriculum aligns with the Pakistan Army’s own 2025 operational record, suggesting the exercise is being treated by both sides as a routine, full-tempo engagement rather than a political signal. The wider question — whether the 13th edition will be the template for a renewed expansion of the bilateral training programme after the political strains of 2024 — was not answered on the day.
Sources & reporting notes
This article is a synthesis of the Inter-Services Public Relations press release on the 13th bilateral Pakistan-US joint counter-terrorism exercise 'Inspired Gambit 2026', as reported by Dawn on 10 January 2026, with contextual material from the Wikipedia article on the National Counter Terrorism Centre and from Dawn's 6 January 2026 end-of-year DG ISPR briefing. No independent wire-side reporting on the 13th Inspired Gambit was retrieved on the day.
- Dawn — 2-week-long Pakistan, US joint military exercise commences10 January 2026 · Editorially independent Pakistan-based reporting on the 10 January ISPR statement; supplies the exercise name, the 13th-edition framing, the NCTC Pabbi venue, the two-week duration, the urban-warfare marksmanship focus, and the on-the-day correction placing Pabbi near Kharian rather than in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
- Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) — Pakistan Army 'Inspired Gambit 2026' opening ceremony press release, 9-10 January 20269-10 January 2026 · Primary record of the day's exercise; the Pakistan Army's media wing's full statement as published on the ISPR portal and carried by Dawn, with the doctrinal framing, the bilateral interoperability focus, and the standard ISPR text on peace and stability.
- Wikipedia — National Counter Terrorism Centre (Pakistan)Reference page for the exercise venue · Records the NCTC as the Pakistan Army's principal counter-terrorism training hub and the country's designated centre of excellence for National Action Plan counter-terrorism implementation; used here only as a contextual reference for venue identification.
- Dawn — DG ISPR says Afghans involved in major terrorist incidents in Pakistan in 20256 January 2026 · Independent Pakistan coverage of the 6 January DG ISPR end-of-year briefing; supplies the 2025 IBO and terrorist-killed figures, the geographic breakdown, and the Azm-i-Istehkam framing against which the 13th Inspired Gambit's urban-warfare curriculum sits.
