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US stands right beside Islamabad
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - While the foreign policy debate here has focused primarily on
Afghanistan and Iran over the past two weeks, official Washington has been
moving to tighten ties with a key neighbor of both countries, Pakistan.
Late last week, Congress finally cleared legislation that would triple the
current level of US non-military aid to Islamabad over the next five years, to
an annual rate of US$1.5 billion. Only a fraction of the $11 billion provided
to Pakistan under the administration of US president George W Bush from 2001
was devoted to non-military assistance.
While the additional assistance will likely help bolster Washington's badly
damaged image among the general public in
Pakistan, however, the new bill omitted a key provision that would have granted
generous trade preferences for exports from the country's regions where both
Taliban insurgencies in both Afghanistan and Pakistan have gained most of their
recruits.
Passage of the bill, which President Barack Obama is expected to sign this
week, comes amid reports that the Pakistani army is preparing to launch a major
offensive - long encouraged by Washington - against the Pakistani Taliban's and
al-Qaeda's main stronghold in South Waziristan.
The pending campaign, which follows the army's conquests of Bajaur and Mohmand
agencies in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the Swat
Valley in North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), is designed to take advantage of
the August 5 killing - apparently by a US Predator drone strike - of the
Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, and reported infighting among
Taliban leaders that followed it.
While Washington had hoped that the Pakistani military would have moved earlier
into South Waziristan, it has been encouraged by the army's recent performance
in taking on the Taliban in North Waziristan and the NWFP.
"If South Waziristan is indeed next, that would be a significant development,"
said Bruce Riedel, a South Asia specialist and former senior Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst who chaired the White House's review on
Afghanistan and Pakistan ("AfPak") after Obama came to office.
"More pressure is being put on al-Qaeda's safe haven [in Waziristan] today than
at any time since 2003 and 2004," he told an audience at the Brookings
Institution, where he serves as a senior fellow, Monday.
He credited both the Pakistani army's recent aggressiveness against the Taliban
and Washington's increasingly effective use of drone strikes against suspected
al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders on Pakistani territory.
At the same time, he cautioned, neither al-Qaeda, which is closely allied with
the Taliban, nor the Taliban itself should be considered any less dangerous.
Indeed, that assessment was echoed back in Pakistan itself on Monday when a
suicide bomber dressed as a member of the paramilitary Frontiers Corps struck
the lobby of the World Food Program's (WFP) headquarters in Islamabad, killing
at least five aid workers.
The WFP has been the main provider of relief supplies to some two million
people who fled the Swat Valley as the army's counter-insurgency campaign got
underway there earlier this summer.
The attack followed two suicide car bombings that killed at least 16 people in
northwest Pakistan, including the NWFP's capital, Peshawar, last week in what
the Taliban claimed was retaliation for Mehsud's killing.
It also followed an interview with five Pakistani reporters on Sunday with
Mehsud's apparent successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, and other key Pakistani Taliban
leaders in the town of Sararogha in South Waziristan that embarrassed Pakistani
and some US intelligence officials who had claimed that Hikimullah had been
killed in factional fighting that broke out after Baitullah's death.
"We are fully prepared for that operation," Hakimullah told reporters in
reference to the army's pending attack on Taliban strongholds in South
Waziristan, "and we will give full proof of those preparations once the
offensive is launched."
While Hakimullah's survival and confidence likely disappointed officials here,
Washington is still much more hopeful about the direction of events in Pakistan
than last winter when the Taliban's takeover of Bajaur put it within 100
kilometers of Islamabad itself. Some independent experts had warned at the time
that the nuclear-armed Pakistani state, led by an increasingly unpopular
President Asif Ali Zardari, could collapse under the pressure.
The Obama administration now believes that the Pakistani Taliban had
effectively over-reached and that Pakistan's elite, including the army, has
come to see it and its al-Qaeda ally as a much greater threat to the country
than ever before.
This perception, in turn, has led to significantly greater military and
intelligence cooperation by the army with the US, as demonstrated by the
increased effectiveness of dozens of US drone strikes against suspected
al-Qaeda and Taliban targets on Pakistani soil so far this year.
Such cooperation remains deeply unpopular within Pakistan, according to recent
public opinion polls. Indeed, a survey of nearly 5,000 Pakistanis conducted at
the end of July and early August and released late last week by the
International Republican Institute (IRI) found that 80% of respondents oppose
cooperation with the US "war on terror", up from 61% as recently as last March.
A slightly smaller percentage opposes US drone attacks.
The same polls, however, have shown a strong shift against the Taliban and
al-Qaeda, as well. Nearly nine out of 10 respondents in the IRI poll said they
considered the two groups a "serious problem" in Pakistan, up from just over
50% one year ago. Seventy percent said they supported the army's
counter-insurgency efforts, up from less than 30% two years ago.
It is in that context that Washington hopes to improve its own standing among
the Pakistani public, in part by substantially increasing non-military aid and
doing more to ensure that its intended beneficiaries receive it. The State
Department last week announced that it intended to sharply reduce its reliance
for the delivery of aid to Pakistan on private contractors which have been
accused of waste and corruption.
Congress put some conditions on the new assistance package. Under one
provision, for example, half of the annual disbursement would be withheld until
the special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, currently Richard
Holbrooke, certified that Islamabad was making "reasonable progress" in
carrying out the main purposes of the aid. These include democratic reform,
reducing corruption, and improving health care and public education, especially
for women and girls.
Disbursement of military aid, which is also expected to increase as part of
Washington's "AfPak" strategy, is also dependent on presidential certification
that the army is cooperating with US counter-terrorism efforts, both in
Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The latter is likely to prove problematic, according to Riedel and other
experts who say that, while the army clearly sees the Pakistani Taliban as a
major threat, its position on Afghanistan's Taliban, whose main leadership is
widely believed to be based in Pakistan's Balochistan, is far more ambiguous.
Pakistan's military was the Afghan Taliban's main sponsor in its rise to power
in the 1990s and has long been seen as a strategic asset against India, a major
backer of the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.
(Inter Press Service)
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