interview with ahmed rashid:
Well, the US has given something like $11 billion since 9/11 to Pakistan. About 80 percent of that has gone directly to the military. And with that money, Pakistan has bought over $7 billion to $8 billion worth of arms. Most of those arms have been bought for the Indian border. They’re heavy item numbers like jet fighters and artillery and stuff like that, not items that you need to fight a counterinsurgency that we are facing right now on our western borders. And so, a lot of this money has been wasted. There’s been growing resentment in Pakistan about this.
(...) But still, Pakistan is very much a basket case. It still needs a lot of money. Its economy is in a very bad way. And the problem is that, you know, with this military regime we’ve had for the last nine years, there’s really been very little serious investment in infrastructure, in new industry, new exports which would gain foreign exchange for the country, reducing poverty levels, providing more education which is desperately needed in order to counter this Islamic school madrasah culture that has taken root now in Pakistan. None of these issues are being met by US aid. Most of the US aid, unfortunately, is going to the military.
(...) And then the Americans ask you, “Well, you know, why are Pakistanis anti-American?” Well, what do you expect them to be? I mean, it’s complete—nobody can understand this, why Negroponte is going up every few weeks. He’s been in Pakistan literally about three or four times this year. His main aim has been to shore up Musharraf and to tell the civilian government, “Don’t impeach him. Don’t sack him. Don’t do anything to harm him.” And the Pakistanis can’t understand this. Don’t the Americans have any other agenda with the elected government, to strengthen the elected government and make it more functionable?
(...) the main thesis of my book is that the US failed to carry out effective reconstruction of Afghanistan after 2001. And having done—having been—and Iraq, of course, was the main reason for that. US money and resources were all moved to Iraq. Afghanistan was put on standby, as it were, literally. Nothing was done for over three to four years. And in that time, because there was no investment in agriculture, some two-and-a-half million refugees came back to Afghanistan from neighboring countries, poverty was endemic, farmers went back to growing the crop which didn’t need investment—it didn’t need water, it didn’t need fertilizer—and that was the poppy crop. If there had been investment in agriculture, even minimal investment in agriculture, I think we could have avoided this crisis.
(...) McCain, on the other hand, has said absolutely nothing about Afghanistan, and clearly he can’t, because if he criticizes Afghanistan, he’s criticizing the performance of his own Republican Party. And even though—if you saw this visit just recently—Laura Bush went to Afghanistan a couple of days ago painting a very rosy picture of development and women going to school and all the rest of it, the fact is that one-third of the country is in the grip of an insurgency. So, clearly the Bush administration will be trying to paint Afghanistan as a major success story. We’ve had Condi Rice writing in Foreign Affairs this week about how US policy towards Pakistan is a major success story for the Bush administration. So if McCain is going to be following that line, that Pakistan and Afghanistan are big success stories, frankly, I don’t see anyone buying it. The American people will find it difficult to swallow, when you’ve got reports out today like the RAND Corporation report, which is saying just the opposite.
(...) the Taliban fought back, and the Pakistani Taliban, the Afghan Taliban fought back and gave the Pakistan army a bloody nose, prompting large-scale desertions from these paramilitary forces who were made up of Pashtun tribesmen. The Pashtun is the main ethnic group in Afghanistan and on the other side of the border in Pakistan. The tribes are divided by an artificial border created by the British. And the Pashtuns are the main recruiting base for the Taliban, and they’re also the main recruiting base for these paramilitary forces. So you had cousin fighting cousin, cousin on the Taliban side, another cousin on the Pakistan army side. And so, what happened was an enormous demoralization within these Pakistani paramilitary forces, desertions. They took heavy casualties. Up to a thousand Pakistanis have been killed in these offensives that they’ve launched in the tribal areas.