Obama is planning to increase foreign aid to Pakistan to somewhere around 1.5 Billion per year. And we are stepping up our demands for them to root out extreme Islam and increase counter-terrorism on the Afghan border.
At first glance, there’s something a little sick about increasing aid to Pakistan. They’ve let Osama Bin Laden (remember him) hide out there for almost a decade, they’ve sold nuclear technology to anyone who will buy it, they haven’t done much to fight Islamic terrorists. And their popular candidate was assasinated, their Supreme Court was summarily dismissed – why are we rewarding that?
But paying someone else to do the dirty work is a good strategy. How much would it cost us to keep going into Pakistan and root out terrorists? For comparison, the supplemental budgets for Iraq were 661 Billion dollars. If we can remove Pakistan as a haven for the terrorists for less than 10 Billion, we have made a great deal.
(Of course the kicker is that Pakistan has to follow through on it’s end of the deal. Understandably, they just want a blank check. “For years, the United States has simply paid bills submitted by the Pakistani government for counterterrorism operations, even during truces when its military was not involved in counterterrorism. Pakistan has resisted linking its aid to specific performance criteria and officials acknowledged that developing those criteria could be problematic.”)