LAST week, a parliamentary resolution moved by the PML-N informed us that the Malakand Levies are still using antiquated Enfield Mark 4 rifles (referred to as Markhor in the vernacular) left behind by the British Raj administration.

Previously, the bullet-proof armoured personnel carriers provided to the Karachi police to fight militants were punctured by low-calibre bullets resulting in many police deaths. In the entire area of Fata, there are no established bomb disposal units and the ones in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are understaffed and underpaid.

Pakistan’s security apparatus was incapable of stopping Mullah Fazlullah from fleeing to Afghanistan’s Kunar province during the Swat operation of 2009; the armed forces were self-avowedly ‘inefficient’ in tracing Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad; and security forces were unable to target the top militant leadership. It took US drones to take out Pakistani militants Baitullah Mehsud, Ilyas Kashmiri, Nek Muhammad, Waliur Rehman Mehsud, Hakeemullah Mehsud, Al Qaeda’s Badruddin Haqqani, Yahya al-Libbi, Tahir Yaldashev and Mustafa al-Yazid among others.

Yet an incredible amount of resources have been spent on fighting terrorism. While the debate on whether this is our war ranges from the streets to parliament, the army owns the war and says we are fighting our own battle — yet sends receipts for reimbursement to the US government. The US government concurs — the reimbursements made through a budgetary heading of CSF (Coalition Support Funds) are declaredly not foreign assistance. As of June 2013, the amount disbursed to Pakistan’s army is close to $11 billion — $10.7bn to be exact. And it was almost entirely for the army — navy- and air force-related expenses total some 2pc of the claims.

Some answers are needed about the handling of foreign aid.

This figure excludes the declared foreign aid given as military assistance to Pakistan by the US government. This includes project heads such as foreign military financing of over $2bn with which the army purchased the P-3 Orion aircrafts (which were destroyed by militants in the Mehran base attack in 2011), Cobra helicopters and military radio sets, and the expenses accrued to the Pakistan Counter Insurgency Capability Fund.

The year-by-year breakdown of the data, including the spreadsheets of appropriation and disbursements, has been made available by the Centre for Global Development through the Guardian newspaper’s data journalism project. It can also be cross checked against the publication of the US Congressional Research Service prepared by Susan Epstein and Alan Kronstadt.

The Pakistan Army claims that this war has not been financed entirely by the US, and that the armed forces have accrued heavy expenses. The army purchased the 18 F-16s and 100 anti-ship missiles entirely out of its own money. The CSF reimbursement is apparently only a quarter of what has been spent on the war against terrorism by Pakistan’s security forces, which signals a cost of $40bn for the fighting — supplies and purchases aside.

Last year the defence budget was over $6bn, and $5bn in the year preceding that. Presumably, a significant chunk of the defence budget since 2001 has gone into fighting terrorism.

The war against Islamist militants must be fought and won, but it had to be fought even before 9/11 based on our own domestic imperatives, and the first battlefield should have been within the state itself. It is the state apparatus that has strengthened militants; hence the purging of the latter must first necessarily have been internal.

We know the social and economic costs involved — almost 50,000 people have been killed, commerce and the economy have taken an immense hit, a generation has grown up with suicide bombings as a norm; journalists in Peshawar no longer flinch at the sight of scattered limbs.

But the question here is that if over $40bn later, we still cannot find the terrorist masterminds and imprison them, if militants are still able to conduct jailbreaks and free whoever has been captured, if we still don’t have equipped and staffed bomb disposal units, if we still have weapons that date from the British era being used in flashpoint regions, where has all the money been spent?

It is the season of financial accountability for foreign assistance. While Geo struggles to explain funding for the Aman ki Asha programme, let us also use this opportunity to figure this one out. Let us also inspect the link between funding and agenda-setting by the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. As declared in the official minutes of the joint midyear review of Annual Development Programme 2013-14 chaired by Chief Minister Pervez Khattak on Feb 19, 2014, the provincial government has received Rs35bn in foreign aid this year.

Meanwhile, with the assurance that 500 AK-47s will be given to the Malakand Levies, the parliamentary resolution was withdrawn.

nazishbrohi.nb@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, May 22nd, 2014