Re: Under U.S. Pressure, Pakistan Balks at Helping on Afghan Taliban
nkdat...@bigmailbox.net
wrote:
Boston Globe
October 6, 2009
US aid to Pakistan a shell game
By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist | October 6, 2009
jac...@globe.com.
Last week, Congress passed a bill sponsored by Senator John F. Kerry
of Massachusetts to send $7.5 billion in nonmilitary aid to Pakistan
over the next five years. Kerry called it a “landmark achievement,’’
in which US assistance for roads, schools, courts, and hospitals will
build trust between the United States and Pakistan.
But how is this a landmark achievement, when we have no clue where aid
to Pakistan goes?
Kerry has described Pakistan as the world’s greatest security risk and
argued that stabilizing the country and stopping Al Qaeda are the main
US security concerns. These are common sentiments, which is why last
week’s bill also allows for “such sums as necessary’’ for military
purposes if Pakistan can demonstrate its cooperation in fighting
global terror and stopping the spread of nuclear weapons.
This week, the Associated Press reported that between 2002 and 2008,
only $500 million of $6.6 billion in military aid meant to help
Pakistan fight militants was actually spent on its intended purpose.
Former president Pervez Musharraf spent the rest on his own pet
economic projects and arming his country against India. Such misuse of
funds, alleged by current and former Pakistani military and government
officials, came as Al Qaeda and the Taliban fortified itself in
Pakistan. Despite the fact that Pakistan is the leading recipient of
support money to fight terrorism, one general told the AP, “The army
got peanuts.’’
This is on top of two analyses over the past year that clearly show
that Pakistan is playing a shell game with US aid. The Government
Accountability Office found last year that, even though support funds
are critical to the effort against terrorism, the Defense Department
has not provided enough oversight to be able to say how Pakistan is
spending US military aid. From 2004 to 2007, 76 percent of US
reimbursements to the Pakistani army - a total of $2.2 billion - were
paid without adequate documentation of how the costs were calculated.
So the Pentagon ended up paying for a radar system in an area of
Pakistan even though terrorists in that area had no air attack
capability. US taxpayers also paid the Pakistani army for road and
bunker construction that may or may not have occurred. Even when the
Pentagon got tough with Pakistan, questioning $22.3 million for
helicopter repairs, that scrutiny came only after $55 million was
already gone for helicopter “maintenance’’ that barely happened, if at
all.
This summer, Harvard Kennedy School of Government research fellow
Azeem Ibrahim published a report further detailing how America
underwrites corruption in Pakistan with these unaccounted-for billions
of dollars. Ibrahim described Pakistan as a “black hole’’ for US
funds, enriching individuals while Pakistani frontier soldiers have
been seen standing in the snow in sandals, wearing World War I-era
pith helmets, and using barely functional rifles. He noted how
Pakistan’s military received $80 million a month even during cease-
fires “when troops were in their barracks.’’
For a part of the world deemed so critical to our national security,
it is outrageous how these abuses go on and on with no sign of ending.
It would be easy to blame the Bush administration and other hawkish
Republicans, but we are now eight and a half months into the self-
proclaimed “transparency’’ of the Obama administration. Yet Pentagon
spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Mark Wright still told the AP in its
story this week, “We don’t have a mechanism for tracking the money
after we have given it to them.’’
Until there is a transparent tracking mechanism, it is meaningless for
Kerry to talk about landmark achievements. It makes hollow the claim
by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that this fresh $7.5 billion gives
Pakistan “the tools, support, and capability it needs to defeat Al
Qaeda and other terrorist groups.’’ Pakistan should get no more money
until it becomes serious about accounting for the aid it receives. All
Pakistan has done so far is toy around with our tools.
> By TONY KARON AND OMAR WARAICH / ISLAMABAD Tony Karon And
> Omar Waraich /
>
> Islamabad – Thu Dec 17, 5:50 am ET
> The U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan is unlikely to work unless the
> Taliban and its allies are denied the sanctuary they enjoy across the
> border in Pakistan. That's why two top U.S. military commanders,
> General David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, and Admiral
> Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited
> Islamabad this week to press their Pakistani counterparts for action
> on Afghan Taliban networks based in Pakistani North Waziristan and
> around the city of Quetta. But even as the Pakistani military fights a
> full-scale counterinsurgency war against the Tehrik i-Taliban Pakistan
> (TTP, also known as the Pakistani Taliban), it remains reluctant to
> extend its targets to include the groups that most concern the U.S.
> (Read "Pakistan: Behind the Waziristan Offensive.")
>
> The argument most often used by Pakistani officials to rebuff
> Washington's demands for action against the Afghan-Taliban allied
> Haqqani network and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-e-Islami, as well as
> the Afghan Taliban leadership core in Quetta, is about resources and
> priorities. Pakistan has committed 30,000 troops to its offensive
> against the TTP in Swat and South Waziristan, they argue, and it
> simply doesn't have the resources to open a second front against the
> Haqqani network in North Waziristan (which is also where al-Qaeda's
> leaders are believed to be hiding). General Ashfaq Kiyani reportedly
> told Petraeus that Pakistan's priority, given its limited resources,
> was on the TTP insurgency, which directly challenges the Pakistani
> state. (See pictures of the battle against the Taliban.)
>
> "Don't overstretch us," says Talat Masood, a retired lieutenant
> general turned analyst, explaining the army's reaction Washington's
> plans for Afghanistan. "If that happens then even the current
> operation [against the Afghan Taliban] will be directly affected.
> Please understand our predicament. You don't want our current
> operations to fail."
>
> Pakistani officials advancing this argument often imply that once the
> domestic insurgency has been suppressed, the Army can move on to
> tackling the groups that most concern the U.S. But many analysts
> believe that Pakistan's reluctance to go after Haqqani, Hekmatyar and
> the Afghan Taliban leadership in Quetta is based not only on resources
> and priorities, but on the Pakistani military's assessment of its long-
> term interests in Afghanistan after the U.S. leaves. (See pictures of
> an attack on a Pakistani police academy.)
>
> The fearsome North Waziristan-based network led by ailing former
> Afghan mujahedeen commander Jalaluddin Haqqani and run by his son,
> Sirajuddin, controls three key Afghan provinces that border Pakistan -
> Khost, Paktia, and Paktika provinces. The network has a longstanding
> relationship with Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence organization,
> and is viewed by many in the Pakistani military as an important
> strategic asset in the regional struggle for influence in Afghanistan.
> (Some reports suggest that this has become a matter of some debate
> within the Pakistani military.) Those who share this view believe that
> the group can be separated from al-Qaeda and could form part of a
> compromise political solution in Afghanistan which Pakistan hopes to
> play a key role in brokering. A similar logic is likely to be at work
> with respect to Hekmatyar, and even the Afghan Taliban leadership.
> It's a view based on seeing the Afghan Taliban as a Pashtun
> nationalist movement challenging the new Tajik-dominated political
> order in Kabul - which is also deemed by many in Pakistan to be a
> proxy for India. There's also concern that mounting an offensive
> against Taliban groups that confine their attacks to Afghanistan will
> rouse Pashtun fury on both sides of the border, imperiling Pakistan's
> domestic counterinsurgency effort.
>
> A version of that thinking in Pakistani circles was expressed this
> week by Munir Akram, Pakistan's former Ambassador to the U.N., writing
> in The News: "To eliminate al-Qaeda in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border
> region, it must be separated and isolated from the Taliban 'sea' in
> which it is currently hiding," argued Akram. "But the U.S. troop surge
> will be mainly directed against the Taliban insurgency. It will push
> al-Qaeda and the insurgents closer together, making it more difficult
> to isolate and target al-Qaeda." He also argued that going after the
> Afghan Taliban, which is seen as America's enemy rather than
> Pakistan's, will weaken Pakistan's national consensus supporting the
> offensive against the TTP.
>
> The immediate focus of discussion between the U.S. and Pakistan is
> North Waziristan. While the Pakistan army has cleared swaths of
> territory once controlled by the TTP in South Waziristan and claims to
> have killed over 600 militants, it has not managed to kill or capture
> any of the leadership, who have largely fled north along with many
> fighters. That certainly gives Pakistan's army a pretext for pushing
> into North Waziristan - as the U.S. is urging - although any such
> operation would likely be a limited one, focused on TTP groups and
> concentrated in areas where they would avoid clashing with the Haqqani
> fighters.
>
> If the Pakistani military declines to go after the Afghan Taliban, the
> U.S. faces limited options for turning up the heat. Unable,
> politically, to commit ground forces to Pakistani territory, it would
> be forced to rely on the remote-controlled drone strikes that have
> been effective in killing al-Qaeda leaders in the area. Conflicting
> reports in the U.S. media suggest that either President Obama plans to
> expand those operations precisely to target the Afghan insurgent
> groupings that remain largely unmolested in Pakistan, or that he's
> reluctant to authorize strikes that go beyond the targets agreed by
> Pakistan, for fear of jeopardizing cooperation and triggering a
> political crisis. But if the goal is to reverse the Taliban's momentum
> in Afghanistan, the U.S. may feel it has no choice. And that's
> certainly the message it wants Pakistan - and the Taliban - to take
> from the current conversation.
>
> Read "Why Pakistan Won't Fight the Afghan Taliban."