Several US senators on Thursday vowed to impose conditions on proposed military assistance to Pakistan, saying that past aid had been delivered without strings attached. Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee issued the warning to the top US military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, who was grilled over an administration request for 400 million dollars to help Islamabad with counter-insurgency operations against militants.
"There is a significant unease here in Congress over what has happened previously in the transfer of our funds," Democrat John Kerry, chairman of the committee, told the admiral. The senator said that under the previous administration, there was little accountability for billions of dollars' worth of military assistance for Pakistan. "Many of us did not learn until last year some time that for those six or seven years that the prior administration was transferring very significant sums of money to Pakistan, we didn't have a clue where it was going," Kerry said.
"And we learned subsequently that most of it was going into their general budget. That is not going to fly here and they need to know that," he said. Kerry and other senators said they had proposed legislation that would ensure "adequate levels of scrutiny, accountability." Senator Jim Webb, a Democrat from Virginia, said he had introduced an amendment that would prohibit the funds from being used to support the development or deployment of Pakistan's nuclear weapons.
President Barack Obama's administration is asking for 400 million dollars to bolster Pakistan's counter-insurgency resources as part of a supplemental budget request for 2009. The administration hopes to secure 700 million dollars for the same program for fiscal year 2010, officials said. The "Pakistan counter-insurgency capability fund" would be managed by the head of Central Command, General David Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The fund request is part of the Obama administration's new strategy for the Afghan war that places a top priority on persuading Pakistan to crackdown on Taliban insurgents inside its borders. Mullen told the committee the US administration was trying to build trust with the Pakistani government and that it was crucial the military assistance package was not overloaded with restrictions and conditions.
"I would only ask as we condition things we create as much flexibility as we can and then look at it over time, as opposed to heavy conditions up front that almost make it impossible to get started," he said. Mullen said public criticism and elaborate conditions on aid have both strained efforts to improve relations with Pakistan.
The chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff said that oversight had been improved on separate annual military assistance to Islamabad, in which Washington reimburses Pakistan for military operations.
Those "coalition support funds" were being audited under new procedures by the American embassy in Islamabad, US military officers in Pakistan, the US Central Command and the Pentagon's top financial officer, he said. Responding to Mullen's appeal for flexibility, Senator Robert Menendez said: "Twelve billion dollars later largely without conditionality, it may not have worked for them, but it certainly didn't work too well for us."