Haqqani warns US lawmakers against restricting Pakistan aid

Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States has a simple argument for the lawmakers who are considering billions of dollars in aid to his country for fiscal 2012, the Congressional Quarterly said in a report. “We just need to work together on reducing all the potential elements of hostility,” Ambassador Husain Haqqani said on Wednesday. “Why add another layer by threatening to or actually cutting off aid?”
Speaking to journalists at a breakfast organised by the Christian Science Monitor, Haqqani made it clear that Pakistan would not beg for US assistance, which totaled approximately $5 billion in fiscal year 2011. Instead, he argued that providing aid to Pakistan would benefit the United States most of all. “From your point of view, it makes immense sense to continue to provide assistance,” he said. “US aid provides an instrument of influence for the US with Pakistani public opinion.”
But many on Capitol Hill look at the United States’ dismal standing among the Pakistani public, despite billions in assistance over the past decade, and wonder if that is really the case. To that, Haqqani said he tells lawmakers, “Compared to what you’re spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, your assistance to Pakistan is a relatively small amount. Whether that small amount gets you what you consider to be desirable results in the short term is not as important as the effect closing it down would have.”
“Shutting it down or stopping it is likely to have an adverse effect that our relationship could do without,” Haqqani continued. And he warned that adding strict conditions on aid, which both the House appropriations draft and Senate appropriations bill (S 1601) propose to do, would send a negative signal as well. “Putting restrictions on aid after voting for it is always counterproductive.” Haqqani said. “It erodes good will.” The Obama administration has expressed concern about the proposed restrictions included in the Senate bill, even though the Senate language offers far more flexibility than the House version. In its statement of administration policy on the State and Foreign Operations Appropriations bill, the administration wrote that it “opposes several significant changes in the bill’s certification and reporting requirements and requests a more workable solution to these requirements.”
One senior official said that the statement referred in particular to the language on Pakistan aid. The worry is that the language will “make it so difficult and so extraordinary” to meet the necessary conditions for delivering aid to Islamabad, that the “effect is that we don’t get the money”, said the official.
The conditions, however, are an outgrowth of widespread skepticism that Pakistan is working constructively with the United States on combating terrorism. Opposition to continuing development programmes and particularly military aid for Pakistan has grown increasingly fierce in the wake of the US raid in Pakistan last spring that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. September testimony by outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm Mike Mullen that an Afghan resistance group was a “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s intelligence services further fanned the flames.
Haqqani, however, said that Washington and Islamabad “are beyond that statement, and remarks and both sides are moving forward”.
Haqqani said he regarded Mullen as “a man of tremendous integrity” but that as to “the compulsions of his remarks and his choice of words, I would let him explain that in his memoirs”.