U.S. to Triple Non-Military Aid to Pakistan

WASHINGTON, Oct 5 (IPS) - While the foreign policy debate here has focused primarily on Afghanistan and Iran over the past two weeks, official Washington has been moving to tighten ties with a key neighbor of both countries, Pakistan.

Late last week, Congress finally cleared legislation that would triple the current level of U.S. non-military aid to Islamabad over the next five years, to an annual rate of 1.5 billion dollars. Only a fraction of the 11 billion dollars provided to Pakistan under the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush from 2001 was devoted to non-military assistance.

While the additional assistance will likely help bolster Washington's badly damaged image among the general public in Pakistan, however, the new bill omitted a key provision that would have granted generous trade preferences for exports from the country's regions where both Taliban insurgencies in both Afghanistan and Pakistan have gained most of their recruits.

Passage of the bill, which President Barack Obama is expected to sign this week, comes amid reports that the Pakistani Army is preparing to launch a major offensive – long encouraged by Washington - against the Pakistani Taliban's and al Qaeda's main stronghold in South Waziristan.

The pending campaign, which follows the Army's conquests of Bajaur and Mohmand agencies in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the Swat Valley in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), is designed to take advantage of the Aug. 5 killing – apparently by a U.S. drone strike – of the Pakistani Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, and reported infighting among Taliban leaders that followed it.

While Washington had hoped that the Pakistani military would have moved earlier into South Waziristan, it has been encouraged by the Army's recent performance in taking on the Taliban in North Waziristan and the NWFP.

"If South Waziristan is indeed next, that would be a significant development," said Bruce Riedel, a South Asia specialist and former senior Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst who chaired the White House's review on Afghanistan and Pakistan ("AfPak") after Obama came to office.

"More pressure is being put on al Qaeda's safe haven [in Waziristan] today than at any time since 2003 and 2004," he told an audience at the Brookings Institution, where he serves as a senior fellow, Monday.

He credited both the Pakistani Army's recent aggressiveness against the Taliban and Washington's increasingly effective use of drone strikes against suspected al Qaeda and Taliban leaders on Pakistani territory.

At the same time, he cautioned, neither al Qaeda, which is closely allied with the Taliban, nor the Taliban itself should be considered any less dangerous.

Indeed, that assessment was echoed back in Pakistan itself Monday when a suicide bomber dressed as a member of the paramilitary Frontiers Corps struck the lobby of the World Food Programme's (WFP) headquarters in Islamabad, killing at least five aid workers.

The WFP has been the main provider of relief supplies to some two million people who fled the Swat Valley as the army's counterinsurgency campaign got underway there earlier this summer.

The attack followed two suicide car bombings that killed at least 16 people in northwest Pakistan, including the NWFP's capital, Peshawar, last week in what the Taliban claimed was retaliation for Mehsud's killing.

It also followed an interview with five Pakistani reporters Sunday with Mehsud's apparent successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, and other key Pakistani Taliban leaders in the town of Sararogha in South Waziristan that embarrassed Pakistani and some U.S. intelligence officials who had claimed that Hikimullah had been killed in factional fighting that broke out after Baitullah's death.