04:16
The U.S. Senate also on Thursday passed the National Defense
Authorisation Act for the fiscal year 2012 with 86 senators voting for, and 13
against the bill, agreeing to freeze close to $700 million in aid to Pakistan.
Both U.S.
and Pakistani officials said the November killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers in a
NATO airstrike and Washington
s refusal to outright apologize for the deaths has been a game changer in a
relationship characterized by mistrust and mutual acrimony.
By: Wing Cdre Salman Haider.
By KATHY GANNON and ANNE GEARAN
The change described by both Pakistani and U.S. officials follows a series of diplomatic
crises over the past year that strained an already difficult partnership based
around the U.S. goal of
stability in Afghanistan and
Pakistan
and a reduction in Islamic-inspired terrorism.
For Pakistan,
cooperation on that agenda was rewarded with billions in financial aid. The
change means less cooperation with Washington and a willingness to swear off
some aid that often made Pakistan feel too dependent, and too pushed around.
Both U.S.
and Pakistani officials said the November killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers in a
NATO airstrike and Washington's
refusal to outright apologize for the deaths has been a game changer in a
relationship characterized by mistrust and mutual acrimony.
In the United States,
civilian and military officials have called the friendly fire incident a
tragedy caused by mistakes on both sides, but insist that Pakistan fired
first. Pakistan
denies that, and has called the incident an unprovoked attack.
Pakistan's
loudly angry reaction has, if anything, hardened attitudes in Congress and
elsewhere that Islamabad
is untrustworthy or ungrateful.
Pakistan has already stopped billing the United States for
its anti-terror war expenses under the 10-year-old Coalition Support Fund, set
up by Washington after the 9/11 attacks to reimburse its many allies for their
military expenses fighting terrorists worldwide and touted by the U.S. as a
success story.
"From here on in we want a very formal, business- like
relationship. The lines will be drawn. There will be no more of the free run of
the past, no more interpretation of rules. We want it very formal with agreed
upon limits,"
Military spokesman Gen. Athar Abbas told The Associated
Press in an interview in the garrison town of Rawalpindi.
Pakistan
will further reduce the number of U.S.
military people in Pakistan,
limit military exchanges with the United States
and rekindle its relationship with neighbors, such as China, which has been a more reliable ally
according to Islamabad.
Earlier this year Pakistan
signed a deal with China
for 50 JF-17 aircraft with sophisticated avionics, compared by some, who are
familiar with military equipment, to the U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets.
Pakistan
retaliated for the friendly fire deaths by shutting down NATO's supply routes
to Afghanistan and kicked
the U.S. out of an air base
it used to facilitate drone attacks in Pakistan's tribal belt. Both U.S. and Pakistani officials expect more
fallout, most likely in the form of additional tolls or taxes on NATO supplies
into Afghanistan through Pakistan. There
could also be charges for use of Pakistani airspace, said some officials in Pakistan.
Pakistan
also asked the U.S. not to
send any high-level visitors to Pakistan
for some time, the U.S.
official said.
After past crises, including the flare-up of anti-U.S.
fervor following the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S.
forces in May, Pakistan
had accepted top-level U.S.
officials for a public peace-making session rather quickly.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the then- top U.S. military official visited Pakistan less
than a month after the bin Laden raid, and pledged continued cooperation on
several fronts.
U.S.
officials said they would like to mend fences quickly, but the senior
administration official and others said they assume there will be less contact,
fewer high-profile joint projects and fewer American government employees
living and working in Pakistan.
Since 2001, the U.S.
has pumped aid to the country under both Republican and Democratic
administrations with the expectation that Pakistan will be a bulwark against
the spread of Islamic terrorism. Anti-American sentiment has only grown, and
spiked in 2011. In Pakistan,
both a military dictatorship and the elected civilian government that followed
it have accepted the aid and pledged cooperation against terrorism and on other
fronts.
The mutual conclusion that each side can live with a more
limited relationship comes at a troubling time for Washington. It has suspended drone attacks
in Pakistan's tribal areas
since the NATO bombings, yet the unmanned drone is considered by many who are
familiar with the conflict to be one of the most effective weapons against
insurgents hiding in Pakistan's
tribal regions.
With the clock ticking until its combat withdrawal from Afghanistan by 2015, Washington's battlefield strategy is to
break the momentum of the Taliban in order to improve its negotiating position
at the table. Pakistan
is seen as crucial to the success of this effort.
Washington
needs Pakistani help to bring the Taliban to the table. Senior Taliban leaders
live in Pakistan, and mid-
and low-level fighters who target U.S.
troops in Afghanistan slip
across the Pakistan
border to regroup and rearm.
The United States
has long pressed Pakistan
to flush insurgents out of tribal safe havens along the border, with minimal
success. While the Pakistan
army denies giving direct aid to Taliban groups, particularly the Haqqani
network, it also says it won't launch an offensive to kick
them out.
With more than 3,000 Pakistani soldiers killed and thousands
more injured in border fights with militants as part of the anti-terror war,
Abbas said the Pakistan
military has grown weary of Washington's
repeated calls for Pakistan
to do more.
Meanwhile some U.S.
politicians are calling for an aid cut off to Pakistan,
arguing that the U.S. has
little to show for billions sent to Pakistan over the past decade. A
total aid cutoff is extremely unlikely, but Congress has already trimmed back
the Obama administration's latest request and is expected to demand less
generosity and more strings over the coming year.
The U.S.
official said the current political standoff has made the already difficult
White House argument to Congress even harder to make. That argument basically
holds that because of its geographic location, prominence in the Islamic world,
past willingness to hunt terrorists and its nuclear weapons, Pakistan is a partner the U.S. may not
fully trust but cannot afford to lose.
Pakistani military officials said a U.S. aid cutoff
would suspend delivery next year of six refitted F-16 aircraft. Currently Pakistan
currently has 47 F-16s, a small percentage of a fighter wing that also includes
Chinese and European-made jets.
Abbas said U.S.
cash payments, made through the Coalition Support Fund, have been erratic. In
the last 10 years Pakistan's
army has seen only $1.8 billion of $8.6 billion in CSF funds. The rest of the
money was siphoned off by the military government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf to
finance subsidies and prop up his government.
Currently the U.S. is withholding another $600
million in CSF that was promised last year.
"The equipment we have been getting from America over
the last five years has been almost a trickle," said former national
security advisor retired Gen. Mahmud Durrani.
He complained of "second-hand helicopters that were
badly refitted."
Less aid might propel Pakistan toward greater financial
independence, he added.
"If the money stops we can get our act together and
manage. It is not the first time that American money has dried up and maybe we
need to go cold turkey. Maybe in the long term we will be saying, "Thank
God this happened.'"
Source: Associated Press
