ISLAMABAD, Feb 16: Pakistan will be charging monthly bills of roughly $60 million for whatever logistic support it extends to the United States as long as its forces stay here.

“We will bill them monthly for certain things under the ACSA (acquisition and cross services agreement),” Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz told a news conference here on Saturday.

“The total amount due from them (USA), including the backlog as of today (Saturday) is around $300 million,” said the minister, stressing that this should not be mixed up with $1 billion debt waiver.

He parried questions about specifics of the charges and facilities, including air bases, saying the defence ministry calculated the amount through a formula under the ACSA. Finance Secretary Younas Khan explained that this included all — fuel, water, etc., that varied from month to month and the bill was forwarded to relevant agency of the US.

“We are following it up,” said the minister when asked about the recovery of this amount, and added that finance ministry’s role was that of a collecting agency only.

He also parried questions that country’s deficit had gone up to around Rs25 billion in the post-Sept 11 era because of the increase in defence budget and revenue shortfall and there was still a gap of Rs10 billion. He went on repeating that “we are not imposing war tax and would bridge the deficit within budgetary limits.”

Shaukat said the IMF (international monetary fund) had agreed to revise the budget deficit target from 5.3 per cent to 5.7 per cent of the GDP (gross domestic product).

The US debt of $2.8 billion to Pakistan, he said, would come down to $1.8 billion as $1 billion stood written off. The US government would waive $200 million from their budget under their present value accounting system but this would take $1 billion off the table from Pakistan’s debt, subject to approval from the US congress, he elaborated. “We are not concerned with their budget procedures that will cost them $200 million but this will waive our $1 billion debt,” the minister said.

To a question whether this waiver related to official development assistance (ODA) or non-ODA, he said it was not yet clear but most probably it would be from the ODA which constituted about 80 per cent of the total debt to Pakistan.

He explained that certain allocations in the US budget 2003, including $200 million aid-in-grant for Pakistan’s education sector, was other than $1 billion debt write-off.

Shaukat said Pakistan’s reserves stood at $5.0019 billion as of Friday night — net cash with the SBP at $3.2787 billion and deposits of $1.7332 billion.

Pakistan, he said, had “very smooth review” with the IMF mission that would now submit its report to the board and hopefully the whole process would be completed by the end of March.

A revenue target of Rs414 billion, he added, had been agreed to, including direct taxes of Rs146.5 billion, up from Rs142.4 billion under the earlier target of Rs429.9 billion. The direct tax target included Rs47.1 billion for excise duty, Rs50.5 billion under customs and Rs170 billion under sales tax.

Shaukat said all requirements under the PRGF (poverty reduction and growth facility) except revenue target have been met, and added, though sales tax target was up from Rs152 billion last year to Rs170 million this year, major delta in this sector was because of reduction in the sale of oil products.

Referring to President Gen Musharraf’s meetings with US authorities and donors in Washington, the minister said everybody praised Pakistan for its economic policies and agreed that all the requirements had been met except for factors that were out of its control.

The president of the World Bank who expressed strong support for Pakistan’s economic policies would be visiting Pakistan in May this year as a guest of President Musharraf, he observed.

Pakistan, Shaukat said, was in discussions with the WB over a number of programmes but structural adjustment programme- II (SAP-II) and central board of revenue (CBR) reforms programme were in the advanced stages.