By Arun Kumar, IANS
Washington : Notwithstanding tough talk from President George W. Bush and other US government officials, indications are that American aid will continue to flow to Pakistan, which has received close to $10 billion in the last six years.
Bush Monday added his voice to the chorus of demands from Washington asking Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf to hold elections and stop wearing his second hat as army chief.
But even as he reiterated his message to Musharraf conveyed through Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice after Musharraf imposed emergency rule Saturday in apparent defiance of Washington, Bush tempered his remarks with praise.
Musharraf “has been a strong fighter against extremists and radicals… After all they tried to kill him three or four times,” he said after talks at the White House with Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan.
“We expect there to be elections as soon as possible and that the president should remove his military uniform,” Bush said in his first public comment on the situation in Pakistan, but declined to discuss the consequences should Musharraf fail to take his advice.
“Once again, it’s a hypothetical question. I certainly hope he does take my advice. And so that’s all we can do is continue to work with the president, as well as others in the Pakistani government, to make it abundantly clear the position of the United States, and then obviously we’ll deal with it if something other than that happens,” he said.
“And at the same time, we want to continue working with him to fight these terrorists and extremists, who not only have tried to kill him, but who use parts of his country from which to launch attacks into Afghanistan and are plotting attacks on America,” Bush said.
Later, a senior administration official suggested Washington would be using a carrot and stick approach without spelling out either. But he hinted that the US would rather use its influence than walk away from an ally who has taken an ill-advised step.
He also acknowledged that the Pakistani government had told the US of impending emergency at the beginning of last week in view of its concerns over the Supreme Court’s likely decision on Musharraf’s election and its impact on the security situation.
Musharraf had chosen to go ahead with the emergency declaration despite efforts by US officials led by Rice to dissuade him from doing so.
Admiral William Fallon, the head of the US Central Command, met Musharraf a day before his emergency declaration and told him that the US did not support such an action.
Despite the tough talk in Washington, the only concrete action taken by the US to date is postponement of a bilateral defence consultative meeting with Pakistan scheduled for Nov 7.
“The current situation in Pakistan would make it too difficult for participants to focus fully on the issues at hand,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters Monday.
But US-Pakistani military cooperation along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan is continuing unfettered despite the crisis even as US officials were reviewing assistance programmes to Pakistan, he said.
All US assistance will be on the table, Whitman suggested. Estimated at about $9.6 billion since 2001, it includes about $300 million a year for foreign military financing.
The review also could address the $80 million a month – a total of about $5.3 billion since the war on terror began – in reimbursements to the Pakistani government towards expenses involved in conducting joint operations against the Al Qaeda.
Also subject to scrutiny in the review is the extensive US foreign military sales programme with Pakistan, which includes sales of F-16 and P-3 aircraft. The US Congress last year approved a deal to sell 36 F-16 aircraft to Pakistan. Whitman said half of those aircraft are new models, and half older models sold as “excess defence articles”.
The crisis is particularly troubling to the US because Pakistan is a key ally in the war on terror, particularly in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. “So it is important to have a favourable resolution of this situation,” Whitman said.
Media reports suggest that any cuts in US aid to Pakistan are highly unlikely after the review.
USA Today noted: “Washington has been reluctant to turn its back on a nuclear-armed government that is an ally in combating Islamist militants, and White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said Sunday that ‘We’re obviously not going to do anything that will undermine the war on terror’.”
The New York Times in a front page report said that in “carefully calibrated public statements and blunter private acknowledgments about the limits of American leverage” over Musharraf, unidentified officials “argued that it would be counterproductive to let Pakistan’s political turmoil interfere with their best hope of ousting Al Qaeda’s central leadership and the Taliban from the country’s mountainous tribal areas.”
Citing a Pentagon source saying there will be no change in the US-Pakistan relationship, the Christian Science Monitor described it as “an acknowledgment of what many analysts suggest Musharraf already knew: he is perceived to be too important an ally to antagonise – even with January’s parliamentary elections hanging in the balance.”
The Wall Street Journal called “Pakistan’s Martial Law A Blow To Bush” and “a major setback for US foreign policy”, while the Los Angeles Times said Musharraf’s “declaration of emergency rule suggests that President Bush has risked his stated goals and principles for an ally who couldn’t deliver on a fundamental promise: to hold together his turbulent country while facing down militant Islamists.”