| News Details |
| US-Pak relations: An idea whose time has come | | 
By Farooq Ganderbali
For decades, the United States has cultivated Pakistan as an ally. This has entailed funding the Pak military, providing aid to sustain the Pak economy and many a times closing an eye to Islamabad’s proliferation of nuclear materials and missiles. And on this has been done under the garb of American national interest! Fair enough, but is it not time that the US changed course?
After all, in the real world of today, the US needs Pakistan for lesser reasons than it did during the Cold War. Today, the only possible reason for the relationship being intact is Afghanistan. Ironically while Kabul is being seen as the raison d etre for US handling of Pakistan in the way it does, it is Afghanistan which actually needs huge amounts of US aid. What we are witnessing is a dialogue mechanism in the quadrilateral format to discuss Afghanistan with the sole objective of getting the Taliban on board so that the Ghani administration can share power with the Afghan Taliban. What a spectacle! We need a quadrilateral to tell Islamabad that the money coming to you from Washington will dry up unless you behave!
However, the real challenge for Afghanistan lies beyond the Taliban. And, therefore, it is argued that the US should seriously re-think its strategies for South Asia and this time the focus on Pakistan should be of lesser intensity in economic terms than what it has been in the past. The US should shift the focus of its economic aid to Afghanistan instead of Pakistan.
The American concern is that an unstable Pakistan (with its nuclear weapons) is a threat to the region. One needs to remind the US that Pakistan is already a clear and present danger to the region, what with it being the crucible of terror. As is well known, Pak economy is moving along only because of foreign aid, otherwise by now it would have crashed. Therefore, it is important to turn the attention of Washington to Kabul, where an equal and more difficult challenge awaits. There the government is in need of support, people have to be paid their salaries, the security forces need weapons and equipment and above all the Taliban needs to be reined in.
All this will require the US to loosen their purse strings and as the new administration prepares to take shape, one idea worth looking at is to at equal distribution of Coalition Support Funds (CSF) funds to both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Pakistan has obtained enough CSF funds over the years, much of it goes to warming the pockets of Pak Army generals, so why not re-think value for money? In December last year, both Democratic and Republican committee members voiced strong concerns that the US had given around US$ 30 billion in economic and military aid to Pakistan since the 11 September 2001, terrorist attacks, saying the government in Islamabad was still deeply involved with supporting terrorist networks. These comments came during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing which examined Pakistan's counterterrorism cooperation with the US, its education reform efforts and US aid to Pakistan.
Republican Committee Chairman Ed Royce noted that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal was on track to be the third largest in the world, and that its addition of small tactical nuclear weapons and longer-range missiles in recent years was even more troubling. Royce said that Pakistan spent a fifth of its budget on the military, but less than 2.5 percent on education. Democratic Representative Brad Sherman said that Pakistan needed to act like a ‘true partner’ or, he said, some in Congress would push for eliminating all US aid to the country. That is precisely the message that those on the hill should be sending to Islamabad.
As Washington prepares for elections and a new President, the real question is going to be Afghanistan. Thus far, the administration has refrained, for domestic reasons, from doing what it should have done; providing air support to the Afghan security forces in their fight against the Taliban. That would have ensured the success of the forces against the winter surge of the Taliban. The current Taliban strategy, backed by the Pak ISI, is to leverage its military strength for the political negotiations that lie ahead. The success or failure of the quadrilateral mechanism will depend on the ability of the participants to see past experience and move ahead of that. More important will be their ability to put pressure on Islamabad economically to stop funding the Taliban.
Every once in a while one hears of reports of desertions in the Afghan national army, turning in their weapons to the Taliban and so on. The roots of this challenge lie in the fact that the West trained this force to be a counter-insurgency force equipped to fight the Taliban and other forces. Also, the pattern of funding was such that the troops were always dependent financially on external aid (as is the case with the Afghan government as a whole) making it difficult for the soldiers to depend on continuity. This will have to shift a new paradigm wherein resources are allocated on a more long-term basis. Allocation will also have to ensure that Afghan soldiers on leave do not return to their traditional job of drugs cultivation, this being just one instance of the need for adequate planning for Afghanistan’s future.
At the end of the day, Washington must move beyond national interest and look through the Pakistani prism and see it as a nation that is just another nation, that’s all. There is nothing special about Pakistan. Look at Afghanistan in a new way and things could well change. Look at India in a new way and there is potential for a partnership on Afghanistan, the contours of which could always be worked out with the incumbent government. The future shows that the US should look at a new idea whose time has obviously come.
... |
| |
|
|
Share this Story |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
|