Last week, just before Hillary Clinton pledged billions of American dollars to Pakistan’s military, she complained that “it is absolutely unacceptable for those with means in Pakistan not to be doing their fair share to help their own people.”
She seemed right of course: Pakistanis who can should be helping each other and there is certainly a massive gap between the extremely wealthy and the extremely poor in Pakistan. Between those who have money to spare and those who spare no money.
But she was wrong.
And it showed in the fact that she allowed herself to make a statement at all about how Pakistanis spend their money: after all, the US does make a lot of decisions in Pakistan so it’s only natural that the US Secretary of State would not hesitate to comment on internal matters in the country.
It’s not the same as the Pakistani Foreign Secretary saying that the rich in America should do more to cover the costs of Hurricane Katrina. That would be quite unacceptable since Pakistan is merely an observer of internal matters in the US, not an actual participant in them. The US makes decisions in Pakistan and not the other way around.
Like the decision the US made in 2007 to start remote bombings of Pakistani towns to fight their “War on Terror”. That decision has devastated Pakistan’s economy to a point where its GDP has dropped by nearly 4 percent in the 3 years since the bombings began. Companies are afraid to invest in Pakistan and nations are hesitant to trade. Pakistanis themselves are leaving in droves the flight of a large and growing number of the talented, skilled and progressive youth to the West and Middle East in the past 3 years has not only been a sucker punch to the economy but has left Pakistani society rattling, as well.
The violence physical, economic and social has brutalized and traumatized a whole generation of Pakistanis who will, naturally, not soon forget what was done to them and their lives. Many of them will turn their anger at US and European imperialism into religious extremism because in a country where education and literacy levels are abysmally low this is more often than not the only alternative for people who want to grasp some control over their fate.
Then there is the decision the US made this year under Hillary’s guard to not only continue bombing Pakistan but to increase the bombings, thus devastating or killing the same poor people who tend to be the victims of disasters natural or manmade in Pakistan. Every day, innocent civilians are being bombed in their own homes, their own markets, their own schools. These are human beings but they are being discounted as collateral damage. On US televisions, they are referred to as terrorists.
Hillary was wrong to say these things because coming from her they are disingenuous. She knows who the wealthy in Pakistan are she meets and talks with them quite regularly, as her predecessors have done. Shes been to their palatial homes and received their grand gifts. She knows what the War on Terror has done to the Pakistan economy.
She knows she made this statement not for Pakistanis but for the millions of her own taxpayers and the taxpayers in Europe who are just as angry about their money going toward her bombings of Pakistan as many Pakistanis are. These taxpayers, like many Pakistanis, are simply sick of the War on Terror that has cost so many lives and livelihoods, and has damaged American and European economies (and thus world economies).
But in fact, Hillary and her team do not seem to care what taxpayers or civilians think. Because if they did, they would not have pledged an additional $500 million annually to Pakistans military and a whopping $2.5 billion over the next 5 years. Instead, that and the $7.5 billion civilian aid package pledged before it would be given directly to the hundreds of known and respected charity organizations which operate in Pakistan to build schools, roads, and humane relations.
The United States has money to give to Pakistan that much has been made public but it does not seem to be meant to help the people who need it. Instead it smacks too much of old news part and parcel of policies made by governments and militaries to bomb civilians and then blame them when floods wash away what little they had left.
The writer is a US-based political analyst.
