US military aid: then and now
THERE are two main views on the foreign aid — mostly military, and from the US — which Pakistan has received in the past.
The first is that Pakistan has been over-dependent on it for long-term development resulting in insufficient mobilisation of domestic resources (a negative link between domestic savings and foreign aid, the Dutch disease, strategic rent-seeking and other esoteric economic phenomena are often cited as evidence) and perpetual dependency on foreign relief.
The other view, unfortunately predominant, is that aid received by Pakistan is far too little. 'Peanuts' is the word Gen Ziaul Haq used to ridicule Jimmy Carter who offered $325m for three years to support the Afghan jihad. He then waited to drive a much harder bargain with Reagan.
Gen Musharraf was recently reported to have expressed regret over not demanding $20bn per year, instead of the paltry $1.5bn that he agreed to accept from Bush in a rush. Had he succeeded in striking that bargain, we would have indeed made a profit of several billion dollars, as the total cost of the war has been estimated at $35bn — approximately $5bn a year. But then, the military would have had vested interests in prolonging the war.
Indeed, Gen Musharraf's autobiography talks of the war on terror as something that was not only his duty to engage in as Pakistan's chief soldier, but also as a lucrative business proposition for the country. Undeniably, US foreign aid to Pakistan for military and economic objectives has primarily ensured that Pakistan remains a faithful accessory to Washington's self-assigned role of chief sheriff on a strategic oil and gas highway.
The idea of a US-Pakistani military relationship first came under serious consideration in Washington in 1951 — in the quest for bases and allies in the region to protect America's strategic and economic interest in the Middle East. Ironically, the event that brought about the change in Pakistan's foreign aid fortunes was the nationalisation of Iranian oil by Mohammad Mossadegh in March 1951, and President Obama has admitted to US complicity in Mossadegh's fall in 1953.
Suddenly, Pakistan's strategic importance dawned on the US — the infant state with great potential as a foot soldier to keep a watch on its resource-rich neighbourhood. The Dulles brothers speeded up negotiations to induct Pakistan as a military ally, culminating in the signing of the US-Pakistan Mutual (Military) Assistance Pact (MAP) in 1954.
The pact became a game-changer in Pakistan's domestic and foreign policies. It also provided India with a facile pretext to renege on its commitment to solve the Kashmir issue under UN mandates. It is important to remember that the pact was signed after considerable disagreement in the cabinet and manipulation of domestic politics by the pro-American lobby in then West Pakistan's bureaucracy and military, which has continued to cast its long shadow to this day.
In his seminal article on the burden of US military aid to Pakistan, scholar Hamza Alavi had illustrated that Pakistan was not a net receiver of aid from the treaty. The expenditure that Pakistan itself was required to undertake to sustain its military capacity — including local costs of armed MAP forces stationed in Pakistan — was to be paid from its own budget, exceeding this military aid. Such callous disregard for the cost-benefit calculus by the military can be justified only by the ambitions of powerful generals who benefited from inflated military expenditure.
The US-Pakistan military alliance of 1954 concluded in the context of the Cold War and laid the foundation for a long, if unreliable, relationship between the US and Pakistan military establishments. The main characteristic of this relationship has been ambivalence in the objectives pursued by them. Whereas, the key interest of the US has been to leverage Pakistan's territory and armed forces in proxy wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the Pakistani military's objective has been to acquire state-of-the-art military technology and equipment to bolster its strength against India. It has been a dubious, if not duplicitous, relationship that has lacked trust.
Pakistan experienced three major infusions of US economic and military aid — 1954-1965, 1980-90 and 2002-07— which, according to one estimate, add up to about $68bn in terms of the current dollar rate. A much larger amount of aid is in the pipeline, predicated on the success of the ongoing military operation in the northwest.
These have not served Pakistani polity and economy well, President Obama notwithstanding. The political fallout is the emergence of the military, rather than a sovereign parliament, as the major player on the political scene in the last 55 years — by virtue of its role as the almost exclusive interlocutor with the US on military aid, which often determined the associated economic aid. Its economic consequences have included geo-strategic rent-seeking, rather than self-reliant — not necessarily anti-globalisation — development strategies and the continued neglect and deferral of structural issues facing the economy. Above all, it has resulted in a complete lack of innovative and imaginative economic thinking.
With the restoration of democracy, it has now become imperative for parliament to monitor military expenditure along with military aid. The US Congress deliberates on the subject to guard its own interests; the Pakistani parliament should also scrutinise the disbursements of aid to ensure conformity with national priorities. The establishment should prepare a white paper on how foreign military aid has been utilised since 1954, solely for the sake of transparency and to avoid future mistakes.