"When [Musharraf] looks me in the eye and says, ... 'there won't be a Taliban and won't be al Qaeda,' I believe him, you know?" So said George W. Bush of then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in September 2006. The U.S. president's trust had been forged in a deal made five years earlier: Pakistan would train, equip, and deploy its Army and intelligence service in counterterrorism operations, and Washington promised to reimburse its partner with billions of dollars in weapons, supplies, and cold hard cash. The plan was simple enough, and since 2001, the United States has lived up to its pledge, pouring as much as $12 billion in overt aid and another $10 billion in covert aid to Pakistan.
COMMENTS (2)
More...
But today, as the Obama administration re-examines the deal, there is devastating evidence that the billions spent in Pakistan have yielded little in return. For the last eight years, U.S. taxpayers' money has funded hardly any bona fide counterterrorism successes, but quite a bit of corruption in the Pakistani Army and intelligence services. The money has enriched individuals at the expense of the proper functioning of the country's institutions. It has provided habitual kleptocrats with further incentives to skim off the top. Despite the U.S. goal of encouraging democratization, assistance to Pakistan has actually weakened the country's civilian government. And perhaps worst of all, it has hindered Pakistan's ability to fight terrorists.
How could so much money do so much harm? The first answer is simply that the Pakistani civilian government, with whom Bush signed his agreement, barely controls the Army and intelligence services -- the very institutions meant to receive the bulk of U.S. funds. Until last year, the closest the Army came to accounting for its work was its annual budget submission: a single, bottom-line dollar figure that the government was constitutionally bound to approve. Even now, after a much-hailed move toward more oversight, the Army's most recent annual budget submission was just two pages. And Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) -- a powerful and independent military agency -- is no better. Last year the Interior Ministry requested that it report to the government; the ISI declined the invitation.
Long before the Bush-Musharraf agreement, money from such unsupervised budgets had enabled the Army to become one of the richest and largest industrial, banking, and landowning bodies in Pakistan. The military formed its own networks of political patronage, co-opting existing political parties with threats and bribes. With the injection of the U.S. cash, this already prevalent military corruption was thrust into high gear. The extra money further discouraged the military and intelligence services from submitting to civilian control -- a precondition for the country's democratization.
From the U.S. taxpayers' point of view, that's the least of the bad news.
Pakistan did not use the majority of the funds for the agreed objective of fighting terrorism. Instead, the money was used in the way it has been for the last six decades: to train and stock the Army for conventional warfare, with India viewed as the main threat. The Army spent the vast majority of U.S. funds on types of military equipment that are practically useless against terrorists. It bought an air defense radar system costing $200 million, for example, even though the terrorists in the frontier region have no air capability. The military bought F-16 fighter jets, aircraft-mounted armaments, and anti-ship defense systems. And the U.S. Department of Defense signed off on it.
SUBJECTS:
(2)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE