Most of the American military aid to Islamabad for counterinsurgency has gone into buying equipment to fight India, said a former Unites States diplomat, describing Pakistan as a country which is “always on the edge in many ways of being a failed state”.
Testifying before a US Congressional Committee, former US Ambassador to Afghanistan Ronald Neumann said the US State Department on Terrorism ranks Pakistan as having the highest level of terrorist incidents of any country in the world.
“Almost all of those incidents are not related to any aspect of Afghanistan. Many of them take place in areas that have nothing to do with the FATA area,” he said.
Neumann said that Pakistan is an economy which faces a crisis because of demographic pressures, adding that Pakistan spends less on education than virtually every country in the world.
“It’s a country where we don’t seem to tie our strategy in Afghanistan. It virtually went unmentioned in the quadrennial defence review. There’s no mention of it in the West Point speech. And we’re cutting aid very seriously,” he said, adding that most of the military aid for counterinsurgency was used by Pakistan to buy equipment to fight India.
He added that on the economic side, in spite of efforts by the US Congress over the last 10 years, the US never had a single report from USAID to explain what the benefits or impact of the economic aid to Pakistan has been.
“It’s not quite clear what the (aid) programme did,” Neumann said
Brookings Institution’s Foreign Policy Program Director of Research Michael O’Hanlan said that an Afghanistan in chaos could provide a sanctuary for groups, specifically Lashkar-e-Taiba, that might threaten the US directly or might want to start an Indo-Pakistan conflict.
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