By Arun Kumar
Washington(IANS) : As the US began a review of aid to Pakistan after imposition of emergency rule, its choices seemed limited by its need to keep President Pervez Musharraf on its side in the fight against terror.
Officials at the White House and the State Department indicated as much Tuesday as they were hard put to defend the Bush administration’s double standards in reacting to the situation in Myanmar and Pakistan where “an ally in the war on terror has made a mistake”.
“We have to be mindful to make sure that we do not undermine any of our counter-terrorism efforts. The president has to protect the American people,” said White House spokesperson Dana Perino.
“Pakistan is a country where extremists are trying to take hold and have a safe haven, and we had to deny them that. And we have been working with the Pakistani government, through President Musharraf, for the past several years on that,” she said.
“I don’t think that anybody expects that the president or the government is going to take a step that might make the United States less safe or might diminish our capabilities to fight terror,” said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.
But he insisted officials would be “absolutely faithful” in upholding US laws conditioning military aid to Pakistan, which has reached nearly $10 billion since the Sep 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
McCormack said the administration was committed to a thorough review of US aid to Pakistan and officials at State and Defence departments and other government agencies were doing an inventory of aid programmes and legal requirements.
No timeline was given for how long this review will last, but “The ultimate goal here is to make sure that anything that we do helps Pakistan get further down that road of building democratic institutions, down the pathway to democracy, down the pathway to further political and economic reform,” he said.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had made a 20-minute call to Musharraf Monday to once again urge him to get back on the democratic path and abide by his previously made commitments concerning elections and shedding his army uniform, McCormack said.
Rice, who has “talked quite a bit over the past weeks and months, and even over the past year” with Musharraf, wanted to “have a constructive conversation and I think that he took the phone call in that spirit as well,” the spokesman said.
Insisting that Washington had not lost its leverage with Pakistan, Perino said the US “can be a powerful country; we can urge, we can provide aid. But Pakistan is a sovereign nation. And they made a decision that we disagreed with. We think it’s a mistake”.
A South Asia expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, Daniel Markey, said US has more leverage in Islamabad than anyone but the Chinese, “but not enough leverage to really get them to rethink what they believe to be in their fundamental national interests or in this case in Musharraf’s personal political interests”.
However, “It’s a possibility that you could structure sanctions in such a way that they were Musharraf-linked rather than really cutting off aid to the Pakistani army”, he suggested, so as not to endanger the fight against terrorism in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, heads of congressional committees that oversee US foreign aid budget criticised the Bush administration for treating Musharraf with kid gloves and demanded tougher steps against the general who came to power in 1999 in a bloodless coup.
“US aid to the Musharraf government should stop until constitutional order, civil liberties and judicial independence are restored, until political prisoners are released, and until free and fair elections are allowed,” said Patrick Leahy, Democratic chairman of a Senate panel.
“In light of President Musharraf’s disturbing actions, Congress and the Department of State should review all relevant economic and military aid from which Pakistan currently benefits in order to ensure that taxpayers’ money is advancing American interests in the region,” said Nita Lowey, who heads the corresponding House committee.