Just Giving Money In Garbage Bags to Dictator
Ned Resnikoff is right, it’s unfortunate that Robin Wright’s story about our unaccountable aid to Pakistan is going to get buried by the not-quite-bombshell McCain-lobbyist story in the Times. Since I’ve already written about McCain and Iseman, I’ll point out what Wright has uncovered now. The lede really tells you all you need to know:
Once a month, Pakistan’s Defense Ministry delivers 15 to 20 pages of spreadsheets to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad. They list costs for feeding, clothing, billeting and maintaining 80,000 to 100,000 Pakistani troops in the volatile tribal area along the Afghan border, in support of U.S. counterterrorism efforts.
No receipts are attached.
In response, the Defense Department has disbursed about $80 million monthly, or roughly $1 billion a year for the past six years, in one of the most generous U.S. military support programs worldwide. The U.S. aim has been to ensure that Pakistan remains the leading ally in combating extremism in South Asia.
6 billion dollars isn’t chump change. Especially when it’s spent on supporting a dictator who took over in a military coup, has little to no popular support, shut down the most popular democratic institution in his country, hyped the threat of Islamist parties and takeovers to keep the spigot going all while simultaneously courting Islamist parties to counterbalance against Sharif and Bhutto, who he had of course alienated through exiling them. While it wasn’t a necessarily horrible idea to support Musharraf militarily in some way — after all, there are rather compelling interests at play in Pakistan — there was no need for us to get conned into giving him whatever he wanted with no accountability.
We should have been able to dictate the terms under which Musharraf received our support. After 9/11, we could have very well put Pakistan on the enemies list – they had, after all, been big supporters of the Taliban. We wisely did not, and instead put Musharraf on the friends list – and then started funneling him billions and insulting him from pressure to reform. Bush, if you remember after Musharraf sacked the Chief Justice, called him a “good guy.” This was just another example of Musharraf saying “jump” and Bush saying “how high.” Seeing that Musharraf wasn’t particularly popular and he insulated himself with the war on terror and he kept up his support in the military by buying them new toys (some of which were to use against India) we should have been dictating the terms of the aid (ie – insisting it be spent on actual counter terrorism, actually getting some god damned receipts) instead of Musharraf leading us around the nose.
The other thing that came up reading Wright’s story was the abject lack of professional in the State Department and the DoD, seemignly, the officials in charge of distributing the aid didn’t care that there was no accountability for it and just accepted it as part and parcel of doing business with Pakistan. This excerpt captures the Byzantine process of accounting for the money:
After the spreadsheets are delivered, officials at the U.S. Embassy try to verify that Pakistan incurred expenses in support of combat activity on the Afghan border. “It’s a big job to go through and figure out what the Pakistanis have spent. The State Department doesn’t know the toys,” said the second U.S. official familiar with policy.
He added: “The embassy doesn’t have the manpower or expertise to tell whether an aviator widget doohickey costs 50 or 50,000 rupees, or to find out if they really burned out four aviatics packages in an Apache helicopter and, if so, could we see them because maybe they only need maintenance.” This first review takes about a month, U.S. officials say.
The spreadsheets then go to U.S. Central Command in Tampa, where officials evaluate claims and recommend reimbursement if the expenditures meet U.S. strategy. But the U.S. Embassy’s initial approval greases much of the rest of the process, U.S. officials said. This second review takes about six weeks, the sources said.
The Pakistani bills then go to the Pentagon, where comptrollers determine whether they are reasonable and credible, based in part of the costs of fielding U.S. troops, a senior Pentagon official said. That third review takes about five weeks, U.S. officials said.
The bills are then sent to the Office of Management and Budget, where officials have expressed concern about poor documentation but have little leverage at this stage of the process to challenge them, several U.S. officials said. The undersecretaries of defense and state then formally concur that the operations are consistent with U.S. policy and that they do not change the regional balance of power.
The Pentagon next notifies the four Senate and House defense oversight committees. If no congressional holds are issued within 15 days — and none have been so far in six years — the Pentagon issues a check five days later.
It’s obvious why there was no accountability and by all reason, we funneled a lot of money into pointless programs. If no one cares about spending money well and if one of the goals of the aid program is too just give Musharraf a lot of money to buy off his support, then of course there won’t be any oversight or discipline.
