Pakistan’s military concerned over US aid bill

By NAHAL TOOSI, Associated Press Writer

Pakistan’s powerful military on Wednesday rejected U.S. attempts to link billions of dollars in foreign aid to increased monitoring of its anti-terror efforts, complicating American attempts to strike al-Qaida and Taliban fighters on the Afghan border.

Although the U.S.-backed government of President Asif Ali Zardari

has the final say on whether to accept the money, the unusual public criticism threatens to force its hand and undermine military cooperation with the Americans just as the Pakistani army prepares for what could be its most important offensive against extremists since the U.S.-led anti-terror campaign began exactly eight years ago.

Any breakdown in intelligence sharing and other types of cooperation would hurt the American fight against a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan. U.S. and NATO commanders say the war there cannot be won unless Islamabad does more to tackle extremists on its side of the border.

In Washington, President Barack Obama met with his national security team for a strategy session on Afghanistan after signaling that he was not considering a troop withdrawal. The session came amid new polls showing waning support for the war in the United States.

The military’s criticism of the bill came in a brief written statement that said senior commanders, including the army chief, “expressed serious concern regarding clauses impacting on national security.”

Among other strings, the bill conditions U.S. aid on whether Pakistan government maintains effective control over the military, including its budgets, the chain of command and top promotions.

Some analysts said the military’s statement had little to do with genuine dislike of a bill that stands to help crumbling schools, roads and hospitals. They said the army was sending a message to the Pakistani and U.S. governments about the limits of civilian control in a country that’s been subject to military rule for nearly half of its 62-year history.

“Clearly the government is under direct pressure from the army,” said Cyril Almeida, a columnist for Dawn newspaper. “The army’s public statement indicates that it is sending a message that says look, we are in charge of security issues.”

The military is believed to have increased its cooperation with U.S. forces over the past year, shared intelligence for numbers of U.S. missile strikes on militant targets – most notably the one which killed Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud. The U.S. military clearly hopes for more Pakistani cooperation in hunting down other targets as well, including al-Qaida and Afghan Taliban leaders who are less of a priority for the Pakistanis.

Political tension in Islamabad would pose another obstacle to U.S. war goals. The debate comes as the army stepped up preparations for a new offensive in South Waziristan, an operation that would face steep challenges, ranging from harsh terrain to well dug-in militants. An estimated 10,000 well-armed militants, including foreign fighters, are believed to be in the region.

Opposition lawmakers jumped at the opportunity to weaken a president widely viewed as a U.S. puppet, calling on the government to reject the legislation as an unacceptable intrusion into Pakistan’s internal affairs. A recent poll by the International Republican Institute found that 80 percent of Pakistanis surveyed said they did not want the country to assist the U.S. in the fight against terrorism.

The aid bill, which Obama is expected to sign, would triple U.S. nonmilitary assistance to Pakistan, providing $1.5 billion a year over the next five years. U.S. officials say the goal is to alleviate widespread poverty, lessening the allure of Islamist extremists and supporting the country’s transition to democracy.

Zardari has championed the legislation as a break from past U.S. aid packages, which he says came with more strings. He says the bill is proof that Washington is committed to helping the country long-term.

But to many here, it is sign of growing – and unwanted – U.S. influence. In addition to civilian aid, the legislation authorizes “such sums as are necessary” for counterterrorism assistance – but only on several conditions.

Those include yearly certification that Pakistan is making a sustained commitment to combating terrorist groups, cooperating in stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and that its security forces are not subverting the country’s political or judicial processes. Failure to do those things would mean the aid stops flowing.

The bipartisan bill, sponsored by Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Dick Lugar of Indiana, also calls for strict monitoring of how all the funds are spent. Much of past American assistance to Pakistan has fallen into the wrong hands. Between 2002 and 2008, as al-Qaida regrouped in the country after fleeing Afghanistan, only $500 million of the $6.6 billion in American aid actually made it to the Pakistani military, two Pakistani army generals told The Associated Press recently.

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly tried to ease Pakistani concerns.

“Since we are stewards of U.S. taxpayer funds, we have to build in certain consultation mechanisms, monitoring mechanisms,” Kelly said. “These are in no way intended to impinge on Pakistan’s sovereignty.”

The Pakistani military’s statement referred to the parliament’s deliberation on the subject, which it said would allow “the government to develop a national response.”

Hours later, lawmakers began a debate over whether to accept the aid. They are empowered only with making a recommendation to Zardari’s government.

“Each and every page of the bill is reflective of the insulting attitude towards Pakistan,” said opposition leader Ch. Nisar Ali Khan, part of a chorus of politicians and columnists that have criticized it in recent days. “It seeks to safeguard the interests of the United States.”

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani was more conciliatory, telling parliament the government would look into the concerns of the military, and had not yet agreed to accept the money.

“We have not done anything so far without consensus and we will develop consensus on this, too,” he said.

On a trip to Washington, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi played down the military’s statement, calling the aid package the “first, very strong signal of a long-term commitment with the people of Pakistan.”

But opposition leaders objected to demands that the country dismantle “terrorists bases” in the southwestern city of Quetta – where U.S. officials say Afghan Taliban leaders are based – and the eastern town of Muridke, the home of an Islamist group implicated in attacks on India.

Another potential sore point is language on nuclear proliferation that calls on Pakistan to provide “direct access to Pakistani nationals associated with such networks.” That appears to allude to nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who is alleged to have spread nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya.

The outcry over the bill follows a backlash over U.S. plans to add hundreds more embassy staff in Islamabad.

Almeida and other analysts said that in the end Pakistan was unlikely to reject the aid.

“There’ll be a lot of noise, but at the end of the day the bill is about giving Pakistan money, and we need money and we’re probably going to take the money, but we’re going to do in a way which suggests that we’re taking it under protest.”

___

Associated Press writer Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.

Source

Testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Steve Coll

President, New America Foundation

October 1, 2009

Thank you for this opportunity to testify about the effects of U.S. policy in

Afghanistan on the stability and political evolution of Pakistan.

It seems useful to begin with an assessment of where U.S. interests in Pakistan are

located. The success of Pakistan – that is, its emergence as a stable, modernizing,

prosperous, pluralistic country, at peace with its neighbors and within its borders, and

integrated economically in South and Central Asia – is important, even vital, not only to

the United States but to the broader international community. The nuclear danger in

South Asia alone argues for risk-taking investments in Pakistan’s success.

In addition,

any durable American “exit strategy” from Afghanistan will depend upon the emergence

of a stable Pakistan that is moving toward normalization with India and the reduction of

extremism within its borders.

For nearly four decades, Pakistan’s struggle to achieve its constitutional and

founding ideals of democracy, pluralism, and a culture rooted in a modernizing Islam

have been impeded in part by the spillover effects of continual warfare in Afghanistan.

These spillover effects have influenced the militarization of Pakistanis politics,

encouraged the development of a “paranoid style” in Pakistani security doctrines, and

more recently, helped to radicalize sections of the country’s population.

The United States today is a catalyzing power in this same, continual Afghan

warfare. U.S. actions in Afghanistan since 2001 have amplified the debilitating spillover

effects of the Afghan war on Pakistan. To name a few examples: The lightly resourced,

complacent U.S. approach to Afghanistan following the ouster of the Taliban in late 2001

effectively chased Islamist insurgents into Pakistan, contributing to its destabilization.

Dormant, often directionless U.S. diplomacy in the region failed to bridge the deepening

mistrust among the Kabul, Islamabad, and New Delhi governments after 2001, or to

challenge successfully the Pakistani military’s tolerance of Islamist extremist groups,

including the Afghan Taliban. In Pakistan itself, the U.S. relied for too long and too

exclusively on former President Pervez Musharraf and failed to challenge his

marginalization of political opponents or his coddling of Islamist extremists. During these

years, narrowly conceived, transparently self-interested U.S. policies caused many

Pakistanis to conclude, to some extent correctly, that the American presence in their

region was narrowly conceived, self-interested, and ultimately unreliable.

A recent poll of Pakistani public opinion carried out by the Pew Global Attitudes

Project found that only sixteen percent of Pakistanis have a favorable view of the United

States./1 That discouraging number has been more or less consistent since 2001; the only

time it spiked, to just above twenty-five percent, was in 2006, after the United States

pledged $500 million in aid to Pakistan and after it played a visible and significant role in

an earthquake relief effort in Pakistani-held Kashmir. The Senate’s recent unanimous

passage of the Kerry-Lugar bill, providing $1.5 billion in aid to Pakistan for each of the

next five years, offers a foothold to begin shifting U.S. policy in a more rewarding

direction. However, it would be a mistake to underestimate the depth of the resentments

and sources of instability in Pakistan that now confront the United States. A poll carried

out by Gallup and Al Jazeera in July asked a sample of Pakistanis what constituted the

biggest threat to Pakistan’s security. Fifty-nine percent answered that it was the United

States, followed by eighteen percent who named India and only eleven percent who

named the Taliban./2

The measure of American policy in Pakistan, of course, is not American

popularity but Pakistan’s own durable stability and peaceful evolution. However, the

dismal view of the United States held across so many constituencies in Pakistan today –

particularly the widespread view that U.S. policy in Afghanistan and along the Pakistan-

Afghan border constitutes a grave threat to Pakistan – is a sign that U.S. policymakers

must think much more deeply, as this Committee is doing, about how the U.S.-led

campaign against Al Qaeda and the Taliban will reverberate in Pakistan during the next

five to ten years.

There is no unitary, homogenized Pakistan for the United States to effect by its

actions in Afghanistan. Instead, there are distinct Pakistani constituencies, some in

competition with each other, which will be impacted in different ways by the choices the

United States now makes in Afghanistan. These include the Pakistani military and

security services; the country’s civilian political leadership; its business communities and

civil society; and the Pakistani public.

Broadly, the purpose of U.S. policy in the region, including in Afghanistan,

should be to strengthen Pakistani constitutional politics and pluralism; to invest in the

Pakistani people and civil society; to enable the Pakistani military to secure the country

while preserving and enhancing civilian rule; and most critically of all, to persuade the

Pakistani military and intelligence services that it is in Pakistan’s national interest to

pursue normalization and economic integration with India and to abandon its support for

proxy Islamist groups such as the Afghan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and others.

This is the strategic prism through which U.S. policy choices in Afghanistan

today should be evaluated.

One obstacle to the achievement of these goals is the deeply held view within the

Pakistani security services that the United States will abandon the region once it has

defeated or disabled Al Qaeda. Pakistani generals correctly fear that a precipitous

American withdrawal from Afghanistan would be destabilizing, and that it would

strengthen Islamist radical networks, including but not limited to the Taliban, who are

today destabilizing Pakistan as well as the wider region.

Alternatively or concurrently, sections of the Pakistani military and civilian elite

also fear that the United States may collaborate with India, naively or deliberately, to

weaken Pakistan, by supporting governments in Kabul that at best are hostile to Pakistani

interests or at worst facilitate Indian efforts to destabilize, disarm or even destroy the

Pakistani state.

The presence and depth of these fears among the Pakistani elites implies that the

United States should avoid taking actions in Afghanistan that reinforce this debilitating,

self-defeating belief system within the Pakistani security services. It implies that

Washington should, on the other hand, embrace those policies that are most likely to

ameliorate or subdue such policies within Pakistan over time.

Pakistan’s historical, self-defeating support for the Taliban and similar groups is

rooted in the belief that Pakistan requires unconventional forces, as well as a nuclear

deterrent, to offset India’s conventional military and industrial might. This logic of

existential insecurity has informed Pakistan’s policies in Afghanistan because Pakistani

generals have seen an Indian hand in Kabul since the days of the Soviet invasion. They

interpret India’s goals in Afghanistan as a strategy of encirclement of Pakistan,

punctuated by the tactic of promoting instability among Pakistan’s restive, independenceminded

Pashtun, Baluch and Sindhi populations.

Pakistan has countered this perceived Indian strategy by developing Islamist

militias such as the predominantly Pashtun Taliban as proxies for Pakistan and as a

means to destabilize India. As for the U.S. role, Pakistani generals see it as inconstant and

unreliable, based on the pattern of here-and-gone U.S. engagement in the past, and they

also tend to believe that the U.S. is today lashing itself, deliberately or naively, to Indian

strategy in the region.

This paranoid style in Pakistani security doctrine has been reinforced in several

ways by U.S. actions in the region since 2001. As noted above, U.S. diplomacy has made

an insufficient priority, until recently, of attempting to build constructive links between

Kabul and Islamabad and to take pragmatic steps to persuade the Pakistani military that it

has a stake in a stable Afghanistan free from the threat of Taliban rule. U.S. policy in

Afghanistan has failed to develop a robust strategy of political negotiation, reconciliation,

and national reintegration that would provide a platform for Pakistan’s genuine security

concerns. Then, too, the failure of the U.S. to invest deeply and broadly in Pakistani

society, but to concentrate its aid in a narrowly based military government during the

Musharraf period, only reinforced the assumption that the United States had once again

hired out Pakistan as a regional “sheriff” and intended to disengage from South and

Central Asia as soon as its mission against Al Qaeda was complete – just as the United

States has done at comparable intersections in the past, including after the Soviet

withdrawal from Afghanistan.

What does this analysis suggest about the specific policy choices facing the

Obama Administration in Afghanistan today?

If the United States signals to Pakistan’s military command that it intends to

abandon efforts to stabilize Afghanistan, or that it has set a short clock running on the

project of pursuing Afghan stability, or that it intends to undertake its regional policy

primarily through a strategic partnership with India, then it will only reinforce the beliefs

of those in the Pakistani security establishment who argue that nursing the Taliban is in

the country’s national interests.

To the extent that U.S. actions in Afghanistan reinforce this view within the

Pakistani security services, it will contribute to instability in Pakistan and weaken the

hand of Pakistani political parties and civil society in their long, unfinished struggle to

build a more successful, more durable constitutional system, modeled on the powersharing

systems, formal and informal, that prevail today in previously coup-riddled or

unstable countries such as Turkey, Indonesia, the Philippines, Argentina and Brazil.

If the United States undertakes a heavily militarized, increasingly unilateral policy

in Afghanistan, whether in the name of “counterinsurgency,” “counterterrorism,” or some

other abstract Western doctrine, without also adopting an aggressive political,

reconciliation and diplomatic strategy that more effectively incorporates Pakistan into

efforts to stabilize Afghanistan, then it will also reinforce the beliefs of those in the

Pakistani security establishment that they need the Taliban as a hedge against the U.S.

and India.

If the United States adopts a “counterterrorism-only” policy in Afghanistan and

substantially withdraws from Afghanistan, it will risk deepening instability along the

Pakistan-Afghan border, and it will reinforce the narrative of its failed, self-interested

policies in Pakistan during the Musharraf period and in earlier periods, undermining the

prospects for a Pakistan that evolves gradually toward internal stability and a constructive

regional role.

On the other hand, if the United States signals to Pakistan’s military command

that it intends to pursue very long-term policies designed to promote stability and

prosperity in South Asia and Central Asia, and that it sees a responsible Pakistan as a

decades-long strategic ally comparable to Turkey and Egypt, then it will have a

reasonable if uncertain chance to persuade the Pakistani security establishment over time

that the costs of succoring the Taliban and like groups outweigh the benefits.

Between withdrawal signals and blind militarization there is a more sustainable

strategy, one that I hope the Obama Administration is the in the process of defining. It

would make clear that the Taliban will never be permitted to take power in Kabul or

major cities. It would seek and enforce stability in Afghan population centers but

emphasize politics over combat, urban stability over rural patrolling, Afghan solutions

over Western ones, and it would incorporate Pakistan more directly into creative and

persistent diplomatic efforts to stabilize Afghanistan and the region.

That is the only plausible path to a modernizing, prosperous South Asia. It is a

future within reach and it is a model for evolutionary political-military success already

established in other regions of the world that recently suffered deep instability rooted in

extremism, identity politics, and fractured civil-military relations, such as Southeast Asia

and Latin America.

The Obama Administration needs to make an even greater effort than it already

has to communicate publicly about its commitment to Pakistan and to the broader longterm

goal of regional stability and economic integration. There is in an emerging,

bipartisan consensus within the Congress on Pakistan policy, as evidenced by the

Senate’s unanimous endorsement of the critically important Kerry-Lugar legislation. At

the Pentagon and within civilian U.S. policymaking circles there is a much deeper

understanding than previously about the centrality of Pakistan to U.S. interests and

regional strategy, and about the need to engage with Pakistan consistently over the long

run, nurturing that country’s economic growth, healthy civil-military relations, civil

society, pluralism, constitutionalism, and normalization with India. On Pakistan policy,

Washington is perhaps on the verge of proving Churchill’s quip that the United States

always does the right thing after first trying everything else.

And yet Kerry-Lugar should be seen as only a beginning. It is essential that the

U.S. national security bureaucracy find ways to act with a greater sense of urgency,

creativity and unity on Pakistan policy. In Iraq and Afghanistan, because we are formally

at war, American policy is often animated, appropriately, by a sense of urgency. Too

often, this is not the case when it comes to Pakistan, even though Pakistan’s stability and

success is a central reason that the United States continues to invest blood and treasure in

Afghanistan. As the Obama Administration and Congress refashion and reinvest in

Afghan policy over the next weeks, there will be an important opportunity to address this

imbalance, in the way that policy is conceived, funded and communicated.

Thank you.

1/ “Pakistani Public Opinion: Growing Concerns about Extremism, Continuing

Discontent With U.S.,” The Pew Global Attitudes Project, August 13, 2009.

2/ “Pakistan: State of the Nation,” Al Jazeera, August 13, 2009.

http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/08/2009888238994769.html

Pakistanis View U.S. Aid Warily

By Salman Masood

Christoph Bangert for The New York Times Ali Rizvi, left, and Umair Anjum outside a McDonald’s in Islamabad. The men say the Kerry-Lugar aid bill will undermine Pakistan’s sovereignty.

Soldiers always remember and feel pride over the time spent with their comrades in the training establishments, units, and field.