[Times of India] A key US Senate panel has voted to impose pointed and punitive cut in aid dollars to Pakistain for its continued support to state-engineered extremism, although the country described bluntly by one politician as a "terrorist state" will still get at least $ 1 billion in American taxpayer money for 2013.So all it really is is an indignant sniff, with no slap actually on the way.
Angered by a Pak court's sentencing of a doctor who helped the US nail the late Osama bin Laden
... who doesn't live anywhere anymore...
to 33 years in prison (for high treason), the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday voted for a symbolic but token $ 33 million cut in aid -- a million for each year of the sentence.
It's that "high treason" charge that sticks out. Treason involves providing aid and comfort to your nation's enemies, not to its allies. There are other charges that could be made if it's just a matter of divulging military secrets or something along that line ‐ serious enough stuff, but not quite to the level of selling out the state.
The cut came on top of the panel voting to withhold nearly a billion dollars in proposed assistance subject to Pakistain re-opening NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A cautionary tale of cost-benefit analysis....
supply routes, although it still left more than $ 1 billion on the table for a country that has publicly castigated the US for killing a universally reviled terrorist.
They pretend that it's not the killing of bin Laden but the violation of sovereignty that has them up on a high horse. The fact that Binny was living comfortably just thirty miles from Islamabad for nine years, within sight of the nation's military academy, illustrates the speciousness of the argument.
Further reductions have been threatened if Pakistain does not change course.
That could actually happen. Given the prevalence of Short Attention Span Syndrome, the cuts would be made, then quietly reinstated somewhere between three and six months later.
The Senate action reflected growing American anger over issues ranging from the NATO supply route stand-off to the sentencing of Dr Shakil Afridi, all of which, some US politicians suggest, show that Pakistain is in league with hard boyz rather than with the United States.
It's the strong horse-weak horse thing again. The Paks see the B.O. administration precipitously leaving Afghanistan. We haven't left in a huff over the stoopid remarks Karzai comes up with when he's high or because the Afghan army's developed the habit of occasionally potting an infidel whenever they're feeling particularly devout. Nor have we announced we're staying until the last Talib's been rooted out and shot, his corpse publicly burned, and the flames peed on by the Marines. Instead B.O. has abandoned the "good war" for domestic political reasons, giving the enemy a withdrawal date to hold out until. We're going to be out in two years and the Paks are lining up with what they see as the victors, expecting to call in their markers with the new regime.
"We need Pakistain, Pakistain needs us,
The problem is that they don't think they do need us.
but we don't need Pakistain double-dealing and not seeing the justice in bringing Osama bin Laden to an end,"
Lindsey Graham,... the endangered South Carolina RINO...
a Senate Republican who pushed for the additional cut in aid said, while calling Pakistain a "schizophrenic ally."
They're a puffed-up Islamic pipsqueak of a nation. They see themselves as a power to rival India and Iran. They see Afghanistan as their vassal state and their influence spreading from Burma into Iran and up into Central Asia. The fact that they're an ignorant tribal culture run by an oligarchy of feudal kleptocrats, ignorant holy men, and scheming wannabe military dictators escapes them. They've started and lost four wars with India, on one of which they lost "East Pakistain" -- now Bangladesh -- and they still think their military's second to none. Their politicians are equally inept, and the holy men moreso. Yet they still think they're a world power in the making and an example to the rest of the Islamic world.
Lawmakers on the House side have been less kind. Following the sentencing by Pakistain's pro-jihadi courts of Dr Afridi, who helped the US locate bin Laden, Caliphornia Congressman Dana Rohrabacher said "This is decisive proof Pakistain sees itself as being at war with us."
Picked right up on that, didn't he?"There is no shared interest against Islamic terrorism," Rohrabacher maintained in a statement, contesting the bromide periodically advanced by the administration that Islamabad is an ally in the war on terror. "Pakistain was and remains a terrorist state."
Personally, I regard it as very significant that Pakistain has convicted Afridi of helping to bring bin Laden to book, but that they haven't convicted even one person, don't even seem to have investigated the matter in fact, of conspiring to aid and abet bin Laden. Binny's neighbors had no idea who he was? How did he shop for groceries? Whose name was on the electric bill? He never needed shoes, clothing, medical attention, a dentist? He was so holy he had no need to go to a mosque? A family in one place for nine years that no one knew anything at all about? Come now.
These and other remarks by US politicians suggest that many of them, including Rohrabacher, who supported Pakistain for more than two decades despite its track record of rampant nuclear proliferation and sponsorship of terrorism, have turned against the country, although even now the administration and its supporters advance the idea that Pakistain is better treated as an ally rather than as an adversary.
Now we seem to be down to treating them as an ally for purely tactical reasons, which brings us back to where we were when we started.
"It's Alice in Wonderland at best," said Sen. Patrick Leahy,
...Democrat Senator-for-Life from Vermont, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, source of more leaks than a plumber could keep up with...
a Democrat who heads the appropriations sub-committee which voted to size down and make conditional some of the aid to Pakistain. "If this is cooperation, I'd hate like hell to see opposition." The United States, Leahy added, is "not going to invest in a country that won't help us in a reasonable way to deal with threats to our forces in Afghanistan."
At least not for awhile. Not until memory fades.
Meanwhile,
...back at the wrecked scow, a single surviver held tightly to the smashed prow...
Washington and Islamabad clashed over the sentencing of Dr Afridi, even as the matter became a political issue in the US election season with some Republicans accusing the administration of throwing him under the bus by publicly revealing his identity and his cooperation even before he could be rescued from Pakistain.
Having used him up he could be discarded. No skin off the Obama fore.
On Thursday, secretary of state
Hillary Clinton... sometimes described as the Smartest Woman in the World and at other times as Mrs. Bill, never as
Another Jeremiah S. Black...
waded into the issue, demanding that Dr Afridi be released, because "his help was instrumental in taking down one of the world's most notorious murderers that was clearly in Pakistain's interest as well as ours and the rest of the world." The Pak foreign office fired back, saying the US needed to respect Pakistain's legal processes and judgments.
Even when they approach the point of casus belli.
Congressman Rohrabacher meanwhile is pushing for legislation to award a Congressional Gold Medal and a US citizenship for Dr Afridi.
The were also something about a $25 million reward, of which at least a part would seem to be due him.
"Secretary Clinton will have to do more than voice protests over the Afridi case.
... but she won't...
Both the Departments of State and Defense need to take punitive actions against Pakistain. Carrots are not enough when dealing with an adversary. Sticks are needed to prove we are serious," Rohrabacher said.
By this point it probably needs sticks and stones.
The politician also contested arguments from advocates of aid to Pakistain that the US should draw a distinction between the civilian government and the military-intelligence cabal who are supporting terrorist groups, saying President Zardari's behavior at the NATO summit in Chicago indicates that he is either in league with the military or under their domination.
Given the military's record with elected governments that's a statement of the blindingly obvious...
"Any money that goes to Islamabad will continue to end up in the pockets of people actively and deadly hostile to America," he said. "The Taliban is only the tip of the spear, the real enemy is Pakistain."
Money is fungible? Who knew?