Stirrings of life on Capitol Hill are seen as Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, introduces a bill to stop distribution of $3 billion in aid that Congress appropriated for Pakistan this year until the State Department certifies that Pakistan was not harboring Osama bin Laden. Here lies a way to call out the pathological inertia that drives the U.S.-Pakistani relationship not forward, but in circles, causing dizzy policymaking. Even after Pakistan appears to have been caught in-flagrante delicto with Public Enemy No. 1, House Speaker John Boehner, for example, was still prattling on about Pakistan being “critical to breaking the back of al Qaeda.”
Like the battered spouse who can’t see what’s wrong with another shiner, Boehner insisted: “This is not a time to back away from Pakistan. We need more engagement, not less.” He also said: “We both benefit from having a strong bilateral relationship.”
He’s half right. With $20 billion in U.S. aid filling Pakistani coffers since 9/11, I see how Pakistan benefits. But I don’t see how the U.S. benefits — unless “partnering” with Pakistan, while it supports four militant jihad networks in and around Afghanistan, or paying Pakistan billions, while it more than doubles its nuclear arsenal, are things that count as benefits. If they do, the attacks on Sept. 11 were a brilliant stroke of luck.
It doesn’t make sense, but Washington sees the U.S. relationship to Pakistan as a permanent ball-and-chain. You can’t just turn your back on Pakistan’s 200 million people and 100 nuclear weapons, a war college professor told me at a policy discussion I attended this week, just as though the USA were a mouse locked in a death-gaze with a boa constrictor.
Why not? We certainly turned on a dime to break with Egypt and Libya, both of which yielded jihad intelligence, peace with Israel in Egypt’s case, and a cache of nuclear weaponry from Libya now in Oak Ridge, Tenn. — greater benefits than anything from Pakistan.
But like hostages self-handcuffed to Pakistan’s nukes, we seem bound in a relationship of fear. There is irony in this given that Pakistan remaining nuclear-free was once the criterion for U.S. aid in the first place.
This was the crux of the 1985 Pressler Amendment that required the president to certify annually that Pakistan did not have an explosive nuclear device as a precondition of U.S. aid, and which halted the flow of government aid to Pakistan from 1990 to 1994.
Unfortunately, both Bush I and the Clinton administrations chafed at the law until finally the latter ended sanctions on Pakistan in 1995. As the New York Times noted at the time, the Clinton White House “argued that it is more important to improve relations with a country that it calls a large, moderate Islamic democracy in a troubled region than to punish Pakistan for building a weapons arsenal that it is not about to dismantle.”
In other words, the U.S. lost that battle of wills and set out to “improve relations” by paying tribute to the victor. This didn’t translate into leverage, either. A further spate of sanctions ended after Sept. 11, when President George W. Bush had the bright idea that Pakistan, despite ties to the Taliban organization then sheltering al Qaeda, was the perfect ally for the “war on terror.”
Billions of dollars later, we know how that story came out, but is it written in stone? That’s the question Rep. Poe’s Pakistan Accountability Act at least gives U.S. pause to consider, whether we really have to remain in (and pay for) a sham alliance with a failed nuclear state on the Other Side — forever.
Examiner Columnist Diana West is syndicated nationally by United Media and is the author of “The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.”
