By IANS,
New York : The Bush administration, which is preparing a review of its Afghan policy in the post-Taliban era, is expected to acknowledge that Pakistan “wasted” the $10 billion US aid to root out terrorists from the country, The New York Times has reported.
The Bush administration report, in the making for some time now, would be submitted to President-elect Barack Obama and his national security team in a week or two, the influential daily said.
“The review contains an array of options, including telling Pakistan’s military that billions of dollars in American aid will depend on the military’s being reconfigured to effectively fight militants,” the Times said in its report.
“We’ve gone seven long years proclaiming that Pakistan was an ally and that it was doing everything we asked in the war on terror,” an unnamed Bush administration official, involved in drafting the report, was quoted as saying.
“And the truth is that $10 billion later, they still don’t have the basic capacity for counterinsurgency operations. What we are telling Obama and his people is that has to be reversed,” the official said.
In fact, top leaders of the Obama administration, including Vice President-elect Joe Biden, has been arguing the same for more than a year now.
Biden, who headed the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, till he was elected the vice president, had been arguing that Pakistan used all the money it received from the US to fight terrorists to build up its army against India.
According to the newspaper, the report was completed just before the Mumbai terrorist attack and it is being updated to add the latest developments.
“The real danger here is that what happened in Mumbai is gong to reinforce all the instincts to focus on India,” another official familiar with the contents of the strategy review was quoted as saying by the newspaper. “It worsens their paranoia,” the official said.