Aid to Pakistan: $2.6 billion spent, little ability to show it

Some avoid USAID money

Violent anti-US sentiment among the public in the area has led many development organizations to decline to work with USAID altogether.

Muhammad Tahseen, who heads South Asia Partnership, a network of more than 1,000 nongovernment organizations all over Pakistan says that working with USAID can even be counterproductive to development.

Aid workers complain USAID money has a lot of strings attached that complicate their efforts. “We feel the aid has to do more with politics and not with development so we have refused to work with them,” Mr. Tahseen says.

Pakistan’s political leadership in the parliament blames the negative US image in Pakistan not only on the recent high profile incidents, but also on the weakness of Pakistan's decision makers.

“Extremist groups in the country have been given a free hand to bash the Americans, and they do it under the support of ‘certain quarters,’” says Bushra Gohar, a parliamentarian belonging to KP’s ruling class, the Awami National Party (ANP). She is referring to the military, which is widely seen as the primary decision maker in the country.  “The group of Hafiz Saeed [connected to terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba] came up from nowhere and everyone knows at whose behest they are pumping religion-based politics and fueling anti-US sentiments. This is weakening Pakistan further,” Mr. Gohar warns.

These banned outfits have gathered support by picking up contentious issues like continued drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas, the killing of two men in Lahore by the CIA contractor Raymond Davis last year, and most recently, the Salala border post accident, which led to the closure of NATO supply routes after it was attacked by Western forces on Nov. 26 killing 24 Pakistani soldiers.

$7.5 billion over five years from US

The Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009 with the US government authorizes democratic, economic, and development assistance to Pakistan of up to $1.5 billion per year from fiscal year 2010 to 2014, for a total of as much as $7.5 billion, according to USAID officials documents.

USAID has spent more than $2.6 billion dollars in the past two years. In 2011, USAID refined the strategy to focus assistance on economic growth, energy, education, health, and stabilization.   

But Pakistani analysts feel that the US government has failed to change the perceptions of the public in Pakistan despite its huge commitments.

“The US had an opportunity in Pakistan. It could have engaged in a meaningful aid delivery program but it made aid subservient to foreign policy squabbles, and to military strategy in Af-Pak which fueled the public perception that US development assistance is a means to further its regional agenda,” says Raza Rumi, a leading columnist and a development consultant. “It is simply tragic that enormous amount of such aid gets squandered either through bad planning or making it hostage to political imperative.”

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