Pakistan: Show us the money!
This is a non-starter for D.C., I reckon:
Shaukat Tarin, Pakistan’s finance minister, has urged the US to channel its assistance through Pakistani agencies instead to save on high intermediation costs incurred by US counterparts. …
“Whatever aid [the US is] giving must have full impact on the ground which is why they should route as much of this aid through our agencies than their own agencies,” Mr Tarin said in an interview with the Financial Times. “Frankly, we only receive almost 50–55 per cent of the aid, 40–45 per cent becomes expenses [because of intermediation costs by the US].”
In a surprising bit of chutzpuh, Tarin said that half of the planned assistance package pledged by the U.S. would likely be eaten up by administrative costs.
You think? I guess it would make more sense to just give it to the Pakistanis, as that worked so well in the 1980s when the U.S. channeled its war matériel and funds for the Afghan mujahideen through the ISI and the Pakistani military. And it worked equally well throughout George W. Bush’s presidency, when U.S. aid paid for a lot of the big houses in Islamabad for low-ranking Army officers.
Shaukat Tarin, Pakistan’s finance minister
Look, I have sympathy for the Pakistanis. They have a lot of problems that need to be addressed and a big one — especially in the NWFP and the FATA regions — is the complete lack of legitimacy for the government in much of the country. It’s seen as an octopus that limits freedoms, engages in petty cronyism and keeps the bulk of the country’s wealth for its elite. Having a bunch of Americans show up with pallets of cash and vague, grand plans for infrastructure does nothing except highlight the fecklessness of Islamabad and increase a culture of dependency among the locals.
But as the FT noted, “Transparency International, the Berlin-based corruption watchdog, last year ranked Pakistan 134th out of 180 countries on its global corruption perceptions index.” There’s just no way the U.S. is going to let $1.5 billion in aid a year be monitored by guys who have shown themselves in the past to be better at pocketing foreign aid than spending it wisely.
It’s a real concern among my foreign aid friends in Islamabad and one of the biggest challenges for the USAID folks I’ve talked to is how to provide accountability when no one on the ground — and I mean no one — has the capacity to spend, much less keep track of, an extra billion or two a year.
One solution is to work with trusted locals and make them the public face of development in hairy places like Waziristan. One development program I know of is doing just that, using local hires and keeping a very low profile. The program gets the benefit of local experience and knowledge. Villages get new wells and other infrastructure and Pakistan gets to benefit from the assumption that the government is actually doing something. The losers? The Americans, because nothing is being done to obviously improve their reputation among Pakistanis — which is part of the raison d’être of these agencies. Perhaps that’s an acceptable cost of doing business for Washington.
But this strategy creates another set of problems. Locals working for the USAID (or any other development agency) are vulnerable to charges that they’re spies working for Western powers or some such. Because while the development agency tries to keep a low profile, it’s not top secret that they’re operating in FATA or NWFP. People will talk. And then people will die, the U.S. will suffer more blows as locals’ suspicions are confirmed (in their eyes) of U.S. subversion and villages don’t get wells because the Taliban blow them up or village elders spread some BS about the U.S. was trying to make them all sterile with tainted water or some other nonsense.
Treading the line between the two outcomes is a delicate balancing act. So what’s the solution? There isn’t one, really. All the U.S. can do is keep walking that fine line and hope the Pakistani government finally cleans up its act and starts acting like a government and worthy recipient of U.S. aid.