Joe Biden's massive Pakistan discount

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has been rewarded for his trouble-making in the Caucuses with $1 billion in aid. That is a very generous reward for Georgia to have goaded the aspiring neo-Russian empire into an ill-advised and silly military incursion. The Russian invasion of Georgia not only speeded up the US-Polish agreement to base serious American hardware in Poland, but also helped settle any nerves that Georgian and Ukrainian foreign policy-types might have had in cultivating closer ties to Washington DC. The Russians might have won the little fight, but they lost the strategic battle. America's cool $1 billion will no doubt help to further secure US interests in the region.

Luckily for the US economy, it can afford to splurge on Misha (as his adoring fans like to call President Shakaashvilli) and the Georgian people. That's because in Pakistan, the Americans are on the cusp of sustaining one of the world's greatest foreign policy discounts. Once the proposed "Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2008" (or the Biden-Lugar package) is formally approved, Pakistan will receive $1.5 billion of American taxpayers' money annually for the next five years. Most of the language and content of the Senator Joe Biden's bipartisan package for Pakistan is a real credit to the commitment and industry of American and Pakistani diplomats and aid workers that have spent years working on improving the level of US government commitment to Pakistan. Unfortunately, the package will be ineffective both as a tool to further US national security, and to help beat poverty in Pakistan.

Of course, Pakistanis need to learn not to blame everything on America, because it was actually Pakistan's own ambassador to the US, Mr Hussain Haqqani, who was perhaps most vocal in his celebration of the bill, calling it a "unanimous, bipartisan and broad vote in support of Pakistani democracy". If $1.5 billion a year is all it takes to get Pakistanis excited then Pakistani democracy, like many millions of its children, will continue to be deeply malnourished. In the backdrop of John McCain's love of Georgia ("We are all Georgians"), and Secretary Rice's benevolence (a $1 billion in assistance), the Biden-Lugar package for Pakistan represents a massive discount.

There are two dimensions in which Pakistanis can view Secretary Rice's announcement of the US support for Georgia. The first dimension is quantitative and numerical, the second is qualitative, and intangible. The numbers do not flatter Pakistan. In 2006 America's $9.9 billion aid programme in Iraq represented a $353 US contribution per Iraqi. Jordan's comparatively meagre $562 million package translated into about $91 per Jordanian. Afghanistan's $3.74 billion programme meant the US provided $114 in assistance for each Afghan. Egypt received $1.79 billion, or about $22 per Egyptian citizen. At $1.5 billion, America's Pakistan assistance package will provide less than $9 per Pakistani citizen (or $8.72 to be precise). The true extent of the discount can be gleaned not by comparisons to post-conflict zones, or countries with solid gold records of friendship with the US, but by a comparison with Georgia, which will get roughly $217 per citizen. In cold numerical terms this means that one Georgian is worth roughly 25 Pakistanis.

There are other ways in which to juxtapose US assistance to Georgia with US assistance to Pakistan. In economic terms, the contrast only reinforces questions about the calculus through which these numbers are arrived at. Georgia has a GDP of roughly $21 billion, and is the 117th largest economy in the world. Pakistan has a GDP of roughly $460 billion, and is the 26th largest economy in the word. Injecting $1 billion into an economy worth $20 billion will surely yield more dramatic results than injecting $1.5 billion into an economy worth $460 billion. Yet somehow, the US forges ahead confidently with rhetoric about the significance of this proposed package of aid to Pakistan's economic and political future.

More depressingly, from the perspective of a body count alone, the aid package for Pakistan certainly deserves revisiting. Georgia has claimed that 215 Georgian civilians lost their lives during the Russian invasion of that country. According to the Worldwide Incident Tracking System of the US Government's National Counterterrorism Centre, since January this year, Pakistan lost over 527 citizens in a total of 393 terrorist attacks. If assistance was to be viewed only from a compensatory perspective, even then Pakistan is getting a raw deal. Importantly, these numbers do not include the rising toll from the "collateral damage" of US strikes and incursions, such as the one on September 3rd, which killed 20 villagers in FATA.

Aside from the numbers is the issue of conditions. The Biden-Lugar package requires Pakistan to meet three specific conditions before it can qualify for aid related to its defence needs. The US Secretary of State must certify that Pakistan is working hard to shut down Al Qaeda (condition 1), cut off the Taliban's oxygen (condition 2), and terminate its military's involvement in political and judicial affairs (condition 3). Instead of utilizing a historic opportunity to fundamentally alter what has repeatedly been referred to as a transactional relationship, Senator Biden and his colleagues have instead chosen to perpetuate the impression that Pakistan is primarily a tool for the pursuit of US national security objectives. That's okay, because Pakistan's limited capacity to formulate and execute policy of, by and for the Pakistani people is Pakistan's problem, not Sarah Palin's or Joe Biden's. Similarly, while there may be national security concerns that Pakistan may have, Pakistan needs to address those concerns itself.

The real issue with the Biden-Lugar conditions is that they are fundamentally logically incoherent. The conditions are pre-destined not to be met. The design itself enables their triggering, and ensures that Pakistan will eventually not meet them. If Pakistan was able to prosecute the war on Al Qaeda effectively, and if it was able to eliminate the Taliban decisively, the US would not be drafting new conditions to give money to the country. The very conditions that the US secretary of state would have to certify as having been met are the conditions that disable Pakistan from meeting them. Pakistan cannot effectively counter terror of either a domestic or an international nature until it demonstrates the qualities of an effective state.

Not only does Pakistan lack the basic capabilities that modern nation states must posses. It lacks them because it doesn't know why it should possess them. Pakistan's bureaucracy and parliament are crawling with LSE, Cambridge and Harvard graduates. This is not country that lacks generic capacity. It is a country that lacks a specific and overarching will. What use are the world's best classrooms, and most revered texts in the absence of a moral compulsion to use them? And how could they ever be used effectively in the absence of an institutional framework to regulate their use?

This is Pakistan's dilemma, and because of the vulgarity with which September 11, 2001 altered the world, this is also Senator Joe Biden's dilemma. It has taken seven years for the United States to come up with a transparent package of assistance for the Pakistani people. It must not take anywhere nearly as long to eliminate the incoherence of the Pakistan-US relationship. Pakistan must be provided with a level of aid that is consistent with the centrality of the country to US foreign policy. If Senator Biden is going to attack the Republican ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin for not talking about Pakistan in their speeches, he better have more to offer than he has so far. Unpredictable collateral damage for only $8.72 per Pakistani is no deal worth bragging about. The only bragging rights in the area of US assistance belong to the brilliant Misha Saakashvili of Georgia.



The writer is an independent political economist. Email: mosharraf@gmail.com