The U.S. Foreign Policy Trainwreck: How Not To Win Friends and Influence People

By Zia Mian, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted October 16, 2007.

The United States sells death, destruction, and terror as a fundamental instrument of its foreign policy. It sees arms sales as a way of making and keeping strategic friends and tying countries more directly to U.S. military planning and operations. At its simplest, as Lt. Gen. Jeffrey B. Kohler, director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, told The New York Times in 2006, the United States likes arms deals because "it gives us access and influence and builds friendships." South Asia has been an important arena for this effort, and it teaches some lessons the United States should not ignore.

A recent Congressional Research Service report on international arms sales records that last year the United States delivered nearly $8 billion worth of weapons to Third World countries. This was about 40 percent of all such arms transfers. The United States signed agreements to sell over $10 billion worth of weapons, one-third of all arms deals with Third World countries.

It is easy to put this in perspective: $10 billon a year is the estimated cost of meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal for water and sanitation, which would reduce by half the proportion of people in the world without proper access to drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015. Today, about 1.1 billion people do not have access to a minimal amount of clean water and about 2.6 billion people do not have access to basic sanitation.

The scale of recent U.S. arms sales should not be news. The United States sold over $61 billion worth of weapons to Third World countries from 1999-2006, making it by far the leading international supplier. Russia, the second largest arms dealer, managed to sell less than half as much.

Arms vs. Influence in Pakistan

The largest third world buyer of weapons in 2006 was Pakistan. It purchased just over $5 billion in arms deals. Almost $3 billion of the purchases by Pakistan were new U.S.-made F-16s fighter jets, up-grades to the F-16s Pakistan bought in the 1980s, and bombs and missiles to arm these planes. A White House Press spokesman explained that the sale of the jet fighters "demonstrates our commitment to a long-term relationship with Pakistan."

The use of arms sales to show commitment to Pakistan has gone on for over 50 years. The United States used military aid to recruit and arm Pakistan as an ally in the Cold War. A great fear, as a 1953 State Department memorandum pointed out, was "a noticeable increase in the activities of the mullahs in Pakistan. There was reason to believe that in face of growing doubts as to whether Pakistan had any real friends, more and more Pakistanis were turning to the mullahs for guidance. Were this trend to continue the present government of enlightened and Western-oriented leaders might well be threatened, and members of a successive government would probably be far less cooperative with the west than the present incumbents." This memo could have been written today.

The United States has failed to learn that paying Pakistan's military bills demonstrates commitment and friendship only to Pakistan's army. It does nothing for Pakistan's people. The US supported General Ayub Khan, Pakistan's first military leader, for a decade (1958-1969), at great cost. He was brought down by a tide of public protest.

The United States also supported General Zia (who ruled from 1977 to 1988), once he agreed to help in the U.S. war against the Soviet Union occupation in Afghanistan. Washington gave General Zia a $3.2 billion aid package in 1982 and promised another $4 billion in 1988. This generosity bought precious little. Pakistan's government took the money and used it buy weapons from the United States, built nuclear weapons, and promoted radical Islamists at home and in Afghanistan. The consequences are all around us today.

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Zia Mian is a physicist with the Program on Science and Global Security at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus (online at www.fpif.org).