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Ignoring India's concerns, US Senate approves Bill to triple aid to Pakistan |
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The US Senate has approved tripling American aid to Pakistan to about $1.5 billion a year for each of the next five years, largely ignoring India's concerns about Pakistani soil being used for terror attacks in India.
The aid measure passed by a simple voice vote in the Senate on June 24, however, requires a Presidential certification that Islamabad is "making concerted efforts to prevent the Taliban from using the territory of Pakistan as a sanctuary from which to launch attacks within Afghanistan."
It will now have to be reconciled with a version approved by the House of Representatives on June 11. The House Bill had initially made aid conditional to Pakistani soil not being used to launch any terrorist attack in India, but references to India were later deleted after a hue and cry from Islamabad and reservations expressed by the Obama Administration.
The Senate Bill also asks for several other Presidential certifications in regard to aid to Pakistan. It requires benchmarks for measuring the effectiveness of US assistance, including a systematic, qualitative basis for assessing whether desired outcomes are achieved.
It also requires the Secretary of State, after consulting with the Secretary of Defence and the Director of National Intelligence, to submit to Congress an annual report on the progress of the Pakistani security forces.
The $1.5 billion in annual funding includes money for Pakistani schools, the judicial system, Parliament and law enforcement agencies. The Bill also includes $400 million in annual military aid for 2010-2013,
"This legislation marks an important step toward sustained economic and political cooperation with Pakistan," said Senator Richard Lugar, the senior Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The two Bills set up so-called Reconstruction Opportunity Zones in border areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, from which textiles and other items can be exported duty-free to the United States.
The zones represent an effort by the US Government to combat Al-Qaeda and Taliban recruitment of insurgents by creating jobs for unemployed youth in underdeveloped parts of the two countries.
Richard Holbrooke, the US envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, told a House committee on June 24 that the reconstruction zones that will benefit from the textile import scheme were in places where large numbers of Pakistanis had taken refuge from recent fighting.
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