US links Pakistani aid to performance

The White House has started conditioning the award of billions of dollars in security assistance to Pakistan on whether Islamabad shows progress on a secret scorecard of U.S. objectives to combat al Qaeda and its militant allies, Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
The daily said that the classified system, put in place after the U.S. raid that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at his Pakistani hideout, signals a shift by the White House towards a pay-for-performance relationship with Pakistan, as doubts grow that the two countries can for now forge a broader alliance based on shared interests.
A senior military official told WSJ “a hard-knuckled reflection of where we are right now” in relations. U.S. officials cited the sharp breakdown in counter-terrorism cooperation that followed the bin Laden raid in May and the arrest of a Central Intelligence Agency contractor in Pakistan this year.
The new approach represents an effort to salvage as much counter-terrorism cooperation as the Obama administration can at a time when top U.S. officials believe themselves to be in a race against time to deal a deathblow to al Qaeda’s remaining leadership in Pakistan, the source added.
Since 2001, the U.S. has lurched from one policy to another in an attempt to win Pakistan’s help in fighting al Qaeda and its allies, only to find itself frustrated by what the U.S. sees as Islamabad’s double-game in accepting American aid, more than $20 billion since the 9/11 attacks, while still providing clandestine support to some of America’s enemies.
WSJ said that US aid to Pakistan, including economic and security-related assistance, totaled nearly $4.5 billion in fiscal 2010. Security aid accounted for more than $2.7 billion of that, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Officials said that the White House has already frozen some $800 million in security assistance to Pakistan in recent months because of factors that include Islamabad’s refusal to readmit American trainers and military personnel who process Pakistani reimbursement claims, items that fall into categories on the U.S. performance checklist, the daily said.
The system was not hard and fast reflecting the volatile nature of the relationship, U.S. officials said. Total aid spending for this fiscal year isn’t yet available but security aid was expected to total around $2.5 billion, congressional officials said and the final amount that may be withheld will depend on the level of Pakistani cooperation and how aggressive the White House decides to be in withholding funds.
The White House was responding in part to mounting calls in Congress for putting stringent new conditions on future aid to Pakistan, officials say. Many lawmakers have demanded sharp cuts in military assistance. They said the discovery that bin Laden had been living so close to the Pakistani capital for years fueled the U.S. belief that al Qaeda and other anti-American militant groups have received secret protection or support from elements within the country’s military-intelligence agencies.
“The message is: You make progress in these areas, and we can release some of this assistance,” a senior U.S. official said of the review process. “Give us something that we can show [Congress] that we’re working together.”
Under the new approach, the office of the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is compiling classified scorecards that track Pakistan’s cooperation in four areas, referred to in the White House as “baskets.”
Each basket contains a to-do list that the administration wants from Pakistan.
Washington has told Islamabad that future payouts of security assistance would hinge on Pakistan showing it is making progress in these four areas, U.S. officials said. The White House hasn’t assigned specific dollar values to each item.
U.S. officials said the Obama administration presented the request list to Pakistani officials in May, shortly after the bin Laden raid. The raid, carried out without Pakistani knowledge, had already fueled Pakistani concerns that the U.S. doesn’t consider Islamabad an equal partner.
A spokesman for Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency denied that the U.S. had formally presented Pakistan with such a list and said that it was Pakistan’s prerogative to decide how to combat terrorism and conduct relations with Afghanistan, WSJ said.
Pakistan’s Ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, said the relationship between Islamabad and Washington was more than a set of quid-pro-quo transactions. “This relationship is not just about aid,” he told WSJ.
“When it comes to our military aid, we are not prepared to continue providing that at the pace we were providing it unless and until we see certain steps taken,” a senior U.S. official said. “We have identified a number of areas in which both Pakistan and the U.S. need to take measures together to move our relationship forward. And while the areas where we need to make progress are not secret, we are discussing them privately, not publicly.”