Yes.
The billions spent in that country haven’t won hearts or minds.
By John B. Quigley
Pakistan is a major beneficiary of U.S. aid.
Since 2002, we have given Pakistan more than $18 billion. Osama bin Laden was living for at least five years in a specially built compound within a stone’s throw from Pakistan’s major military academy.
Even if bin Laden did not don his sandals each morning to buy bread in the local market, it strains credulity to believe that no higher-up in the Pakistan government was aware of his presence.
Yet Congress hopes that by spreading our largesse, Pakistan will act on our side in fighting terrorism. The aid projects are high-visibility — rural electrification and school construction — so that the population will see them as products of our beneficence.
In 2009, Congress authorized up to $1.5 billion in aid each year for five years. Even before the bin Laden killing, that aid was questioned on grounds of efficiency, particularly because of corruption in the Pakistani government.
In February the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that of the $1.5 billion allocated for 2010, only $179.5 million had actually been disbursed.
The problem is ensuring that the Pakistani agencies responsible will handle the funds properly.
The U.S. Agency for International Development was to reconstruct 115 schools destroyed in Pakistan’s Swat Valley two years ago in fighting between the Pakistani army and the Pakistani Taliban. To date, not a single school has been completed.
Beyond efficiency issues, the aid money and our strategic policies seem to the Pakistanis to be headed in opposite directions. The Obama administration has made liberal use of attacks from drone aircraft in the northern tribal areas of Pakistan.
Drone attacks are wildly unpopular in Pakistan. Residents in the affected areas are terrorized, because they never know when a missile will descend out of the sky. Many in Pakistan view the aid as an attempt to get the population to swallow the drone attacks.
Our use of CIA agents in Pakistan without knowledge of the Pakistan government is another source of concern. The fatal shooting of two Pakistanis by CIA operative Raymond Davis in January brought the developing resentment over the drone attacks to a crescendo.
And what is viewed as our continuing denigration of Palestinian national aspirations angers the populace, even as President Barack Obama proclaims ever more loudly that our policies are not anti-Muslim.
Giving billions in aid to get a country to do what we want involves a leap of faith. Our track record is not good.
When President Jimmy Carter got Egypt and Israel to sign the 1979 Camp David peace agreement, he upped our aid to Israel and began massive aid to Egypt. The aid to Egypt gained the compliance of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, but Egypt’s new government is taking policy initiatives on regional issues without checking with Washington.
Even our aid to Israel, the largest beneficiary, has yielded no great love for the Obama administration in Israel.
We are, of course, running huge budget deficits in our overall government expenditures, so a few billion here or there affects how much we must raise taxes, or cut expenditures.
Our aid to Pakistan is not reaping the rewards Congress sought.
By our aid we are hoping — probably naively — to get Pakistanis to accept practices they do not like, practices about which we should have second thoughts anyway.
Getting our own practices oriented more rationally might win more hearts and minds in Pakistan than billions in aid dollars.
John B. Quigley is a professor of law at Ohio State University.
No.
Alliance remains useful as country is steady U.S. partner when it counts.
By Bogdan Kipling
Osama bin Laden is dead, long live the American-Pakistani alliance! Mine may not be the flavor of the week opinion in liberal circles, let alone among those Republicans and Democrats looking to Fortress America as the only reliable shelter for a nation straining under the load of its hegemony.
The depth of hurt and memory of what bin Laden did to America erupted as joy in spontaneous crowds forming around the White House after his death. The shouts celebrating bin Laden’s death at the hands of U.S. Navy SEALs told the world that America’s memory is as long as its punishing arm.
To have discovered that bin Laden hid in plain sight on the periphery of a Pakistani army installation only 100 miles distant from Islamabad, the country’s capital, confirmed long-held suspicions of Pakistan’s reliability as an ally.
Why then do I say long live the alliance? Why do I use the word “alliance” in the first place?
I present my reasoning as clearly and concisely as I can. America — and the western world — must have Pakistan’s help to prevent the hideously worse.
Is it an alliance of necessity? Yes, of course it is. Does Pakistan need it as badly? Yes, it does. It may be an unloving union, but each side knows it will fare worse without the other.
Pakistan is a steady partner when it counts. It stood by the United States when India, America’s current darling, danced body-rubbing close with the Soviet Union — to America’s detriment.
Pakistan made it possible for the United States to reap the benefit of the Soviet Union’s defeat in Afghanistan.
The Mujahedeen — more armed poppy growers than religious zealots — fought, died and defeated America’s rival superpower in a key strategic part of the world.
They were helped by the CIA with guns and sidewinder hand-held anti-aircraft rockets and military intelligence. They lobbied in Washington and showed up repeatedly at news bureaus in the National Press Building.
But no sooner had they won, when President Georgia Bush the elder and national security adviser Brent Scowcroft washed their hands of Afghanistan. They left the war-devastated country to its own wits, without so much as a gesture of thank you and, figuratively, a dime of help.
For Pakistan, Bush and Scowcroft went one better: They cut support funds and embargoed fighter planes Pakistan had bought and paid for.
The F-16’s were stopped on the production line or parked in the United States. The money, too, landed in escrow accounts.
Alliances created on an as-needed basis make perfectly good sense to politicians and publics of the hardball school. They are cheap and offer full freedom to cut and run without nasty consequences. They look great on paper but not so great when danger is self-evident and nobody knows who can depend on whom.
Dangers lurking in the Pakistan-Iran-Afghanistan swath of Asia threaten the United States severely right now and can only grow nastier if Pakistan is cut loose, as happened three decades ago.
I don’t know whether Pakistan’s military and security service kept bin Laden hidden in plain sight while telling Washington they had not a clue where he might be.
But they also kept Pakistan’s nuclear weapons out of al-Qaida’s hands and that is vastly more important than the lie about the seemingly neutered bin Laden.
The question is what to do next. The smart thing, I would argue, is to acknowledge Pakistan’s effective part in the war on terror and to confirm and strengthen this useful alliance of necessity.
Bogdan Kipling is a Canadian columnist in Washington, D.C.
