"Doubts Engulf an American Aid Plan for Pakistan" by JANE PERLEZ
PESHAWAR, Pakistan —The $750 million five-year civilian aid program would provide jobs and schooling, build 600 miles of roads and improve literacy in an area where almost no women can read. It adds to the more than $1 billion in American military aid to Pakistan annually.
While Americans get bupkus for those same things here!
Fuck asshole Bush and his wars!!!!
Wary of corruption and hamstrung by local hostility, American officials say that as in Iraq they will rely heavily on private contractors to administer the development aid, a decision that could eat up as much as half the budget.
The new program is meant to start slowly, with the first portion of the overall program out to bid at $350 million. Among the handful of companies invited to bid are DynCorp International and Creative Associates International Inc., both of which won substantial contracts in Iraq. How effective they will be in the tribal areas is equally uncertain.
Those Pakis aren't going to see one dime!
This is all going to be LOOTED by WAR PROFITEERS!!!!
The region remains so dangerous that it is virtually off limits even to American military officials and civilians who would oversee the programs. The Pakistani authorities have ruled out using foreign nonprofit groups, known as NGOs, shorthand for nongovernmental organizations. But neither do they approve the American choice of private contractors. They would like the money to go through them.
Javed Iqbal, until recently the additional chief secretary of Federally Administered Tribal Areas, as the region is formally called (the title is a holdover from the British era):
“We are living in times when NGOs are considered to be all out to convert tribesmen. To deal with the tribesmen, you have to understand the tribes. You cannot ask a woman how frequently does she take contraception, which was one of the questions on an NGO questionnaire. The first reaction is going to box you in the face, and then tell you to get lost.”
Mr. Iqbal said he was convinced, though, that the for-profit companies would take a disproportionate amount of the program money:
“Forty-eight percent of the program money goes to consultants.”
Rick Barton, a former official at the United States Agency for International Development, or A.I.D., who now works on Pakistan issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the estimate was in the ballpark. Development firms commonly charge 25 percent to 50 percent of a program’s entire cost in profit and overhead, depending on the scope and difficulty of the task, he said.
The region of 3.2 million people has no industry, virtually no work and no hope. Men aged 18 to 25, who are the target of the program, find offers of 300 rupees a day from the Taliban — about $5 — attractive.
The men, almost entirely Pashtun, have little in common with the rest of Pakistan. Their Pashtun brethren live in the southern part of Afghanistan, astride a border that is extremely porous, allowing extremists to move easily back and forth.
The hostility to Westerners has become so intense in and around the tribal areas that an Austrian refugee worker said she was barred in early December from walking through a refugee camp on the outskirts of Peshawar that she had regularly visited for the last six years.
Westerners, she said, are believed to be implicated in what Pakistanis see as an American foreign policy that is anti-Muslim and harms Pakistani interests.
Mechtild Petritsch, the worker who works with the Frontier Primary Health Campaign:
“I offered to cover myself in a burqa, and to wear their kinds of sandals, but they said I would be discovered because I walk like a foreigner.”
Nor has the new director of A.I.D. in Islamabad, Anne Aarnes, been able to visit the tribal areas. It was nine months ago when the deputy chief of mission at the United States Embassy, Peter Bodde, went to Khyber, one of the seven divisions of the tribal areas, to address the local Chamber of Commerce. A planned visit by the new United States ambassador, Anne Patterson, was canceled last month because of sectarian violence in the area.
A senior American official at the United States Embassy in Islamabad after the presentation of an embassy PowerPoint slide show attended by nearly a dozen embassy officials:
“This is an extremely difficult undertaking in an extremely difficult part of the world. Something like this hasn’t been tried on this scale in this part of the world.”
And truthfully, we have neither the time nor money nor manpower to do it!
This is how empires fall!
The presentation listed the range of programs involving A.I.D., the narcotics section of the State Department and, to a small extent, the Pentagon. Besides providing jobs, schooling, and roads the American plan also calls for improving the “capacity” of the local Pakistani authorities so that the government becomes a more viable and friendly force in everyday lives.
That is an extremely challenging ambition because the government’s representatives, known as political agents, run their areas with an iron fist and are almost uniformly corrupt, Pakistani and American officials say.
Moreover, the power of Islamic religious leaders in the region has grown in part because President Pervez Musharraf has undercut the authority of political agents, viewing them as competition, Pakistani officials said. Now the Americans are trying to build up the political agents again and use the development projects to improve relations between them and local communities.
Concerns about corruption are so severe, however, that the first grants will be held to only about $25,000 each, to finance small projects like repairing water wells and small sewage plants.
In an illustration of the challenges facing even modest programs, experts point to the three-year-old plan by A.I.D. to repair 60 rundown schools. Because of deteriorating security, even local contractors were too scared to work in some places. Only 35 schools have been completed, A.I.D. officials said. Some of them remain bereft of teachers. Several are known as “ghost schools” because they are used for other purposes.
Yeah, so let's funnel the $$$ thru WAR PROFITEERS instead!
One successful school in the Mohmand tribal district demonstrates both the need and the potential for success, however. Enrollment there had shot up to 217 students from 21, according to an American official who sent a Pakistani employee to scout the situation.
Because the United States is viewed with such opprobrium, it will not be identified on any of the aid, preventing any possible flow of good will. The aid will instead be presented as Pakistani.
A senior United States Embassy official, would help the Pakistanis feel like owners of the effort:
“This is about teaching them how to get smart about how to run the country and win people’s support.”
Yeah, like the average Paki is as stoo-pid as the 'murkn shit-eater!
How condescending, to talk to the Pakis like they are a bunch of foolish idiots!
They KNOW the DEAL which is why they DON'T LIKE the U.S.!!!!!!
Unlike shit-eating 'Murkns, Pakis are very bright and intelligent people!
Mr. Iqbal, the Pakistani official, who attended college in the United States, when asked what he thought of the American goal to improve the “capacity” of the administration of which he is a senior member, replied:
“Bunkum.”
To complicate matters further for the Americans, Mr. Iqbal, who had been their main interlocutor on the program and who by current standards is quite understanding of the American goals, resigned in early December for an unrelated reason.
American officials said his departure represented a setback for them. From their side, the American consultants often display a high degree of skepticism about the Pakistanis.
A senior official for one of the contracting firms in Pakistan and shared a compound with the provincial governor in Afghanistan, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being fired, suggested a way to monitor the money up close, but which is unlikely to be acceptable in the tribal areas:
“That worked pretty good. You’ve got to co-locate with the government officials. We get pushed back, but you make it happen. They don’t like it because it means they can’t steal.”
Yeah, so SEND it THROUGH DynaCorp so THEY can get THEIR CUT!!!!
I am APPALLED at 'Murkn HYPOCRISY, readers!
