Pakistan is on a rapid trajectory to failure as a stable, democratic state and needs a boost of $4 billion in US aid and loans each year to begin turning around, a private foreign affairs group has concluded. "Time is running out," said the Atlantic Council, which urged more training and deployment of 15,000 Pakistani police within six months to bring order to the country.
Chance: "Given the tools and the financing, Pakistan can turn back from the brink," the report said. "But for that to happen, it needs help now."
The Pakistan government has six to 12 months to implement economic and security policies, or "face the very real prospect of considerable domestic and political turbulence", said the report.
The US has given Pakistan about $12.3 billion in military and economic aid. The US Government Accountability Office says the US lacks a coordinated strategy in disbursing the aid and warns that Al Qaeda 'continues to operate freely in Pakistan's un-policed Tribal Areas'.
Vice President Joe Biden, former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Republican Senator Richard Lugar, the panel's senior Republican, proposed last summer authorising $7.5 billion over five years in non-military aid for Pakistan. Similar legislation sponsored by Lugar and the new committee chairman, Democratic Senator John Kerry, is expected this year.
Kerry and Republican former Sen Chuck Hagel are the Atlantic Council's honorary chairmen. Hagel, having left the Senate, is now council chairman.
The Obama administration, meanwhile, began a policy review this week with senior officials from Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Here for the talks, Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said on Wednesday he was pleased with moves to increase US assistance to his country. "We need economic stability," said Qureshi in an interview with The Associated Press. "Until we have economic stability we will not be able to get political stability." He would not put a price tag on Pakistan's needs.
The report itself said it was sounding an alarm "that we are running out of time to help Pakistan change its present course toward increasing economic and political instability, and even ultimate failure". The situation has grown even more urgent, it said, with the November terror attacks in Mumbai. The report urged Pakistan to show it is serious in pursuing the perpetrators and other terrorists and terror organisations.
"The Mumbai crisis has yet to run its course," said the report. "The use of military force or other coercive action must be avoided."
Another concern in the report is that Pakistan might feel forced to enter negotiations with the Taliban and other insurgent groups and 'grant further freedom of movement to insurgents'.
The report warned that Al Qaeda and other radical groups could be emboldened "with frightening consequences for vulnerable targets in Britain, Europe and even the United States". Compared with the hundreds of billions of dollars poured into Iraq and the many billions into Afghanistan, aid to Pakistan has been 'relatively miserly', said the report. And the stakes in Pakistan are far larger and more important to long-term US interests, the report said.