WASHINGTON: The Obama administration would ensure that Pakistan did not divert US assistance into any channel other than what it was meant for, the secretary of state told a Senate sub-committee on Wednesday.

Hillary Clinton agreed with a legislator’s proposal that conditions be attached to the assistance provided to Pakistan and Afghanistan so that the money was used only for the purpose named in the bill concerned. 

Senator Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, referred to media speculations that Pakistan might use the US aid package to make nuclear weapons or to buy weapons to be used against India and asked Secretary Clinton to ensure that this did not happen.

‘None of our aid will affect the efforts by Pakistan regarding their nuclear stockpile,’ Mrs Clinton told the Appropriations Sub-committee on state and foreign operations.

The administration will make sure that there’s no ‘diversion of money or any use of it other than what it is meant for’, she assured the committee.

The United States, she said, would also like to see a reduction in India-Pakistan tensions and the resumption of the bilateral dialogue to give both ‘a little more confidence in each other’.

The secretary of state said some of the problems confronting Pakistan and Afghanistan today were a direct result of American policies in the 1980s.

‘For the last 30-40 years, American policy for Pakistan gives quite an uneven picture … one step forward, two steps back,’ Secretary Clinton said.

‘Some of the problems (in the Pak-Afghan region) are a direct result of American policies and funding in the 1980s,’ she told the panel while defending the Obama administration’s budget for international affairs for the next financial year.

Mrs Clinton censured the then US administration for ‘walking away’ from the region after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin wall.

‘We have had inconsistent approaches to Afghanistan and Pakistan,’ she said, insisting that the Obama administration was trying to change that approach and recognised the vital security interests the US has in both the countries.

Secretary Clinton insisted that the US could ‘ignore only at our peril’ the threat emanating from that region, ‘led and funded by al Qaeda’.

DINNER FOR AYUB
Going over past US policies towards Pakistan, Mrs Clinton recalled that in the 1960s, President Kennedy hosted ‘one of the greatest dinners’ at Mount Vernon in Washington for a military dictator, Ayub Khan.

After that the relationship between the two countries went ‘up and down’ until ‘our big bash with another military dictator’ Pervez Musharraf.

Ms Clinton, who is a former senator, recalled that many in the US Congress had tried to change America’s attitude of ‘cosying up to Pakistani dictators’.

The Obama administration, she added, was making a commitment to the democratically-elected government of Pakistan, with the intention to intensify person-to-person and government-to-government relations and was also trying to build new relations between civilian and military institutions of the two countries.

Secretary Clinton described as ‘quite unprecedented’ the political support given to the military offensive in Swat, noting that both the ruling and opposition parties were backing the operation.

‘We have never seen anything like that before … to some extent it is reassuring that the government and the opposition are united in their opposition to the threat posed by the terrorists.’The Pakistanis, she said, were making ‘a very significant effort and we are supporting that’.

She agreed with Senator John Kerry, who chaired the hearing, that it was not an easy task. ‘If this would be easy,

we would not be sitting here … we have to demonstrate America’s commitment to the people of Pakistan.’

An important security priority for the US, Hillary Clinton said, was to make investments in Pakistan’s future that would visibly improve their understanding of what the US stood for.

Senator Kerry reminded her that the Senate was also working on a bill that ‘vastly increases our civilian assistance to Pakistan’, redefining America’s relationship with the people of Pakistan.

‘It is something Senator Lugar and I are focused on,’ he said. The senator said that the meetings the senators had with President Asif Ali Zardari and President Karzai earlier this month were quite unique and ‘provided a better set of options than we had otherwise’.

The US, she said, needed to be working with the civil society in Pakistan, noting that the country had a vibrant civil society.

‘It’s quite remarkable what the lawyers did … there are other instances of growing awareness of the Pakistani citizenship as well.’

Senator Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, told her that he had proposed amendments to the bill seeking to triple US assistance to Pakistan, requiring the administration to report back whether it was meeting those objectives set by Congress.

‘We do need measurements of performance in every (sector) that we are interacting with … the government … the military,’ Mrs Clinton said.

 
She said the administration was working with the US intelligence and the Department of Defence, in coordination with the National Security Agency, to ensure that the intended results of US assistance to Pakistan were achieved.