The Kerry Lugar Bill has woken Pakistanis up to the realities of debilitating conditionalities that accompany US aid. The Americans love to claim, “there is no free lunch”, but no one in Pakistan thought that the cost of supporting the US in its War on Terror would be so high for the nation.
Apart from the human lives lost of Pakistanis, there have been the economic costs of becoming a front line state with all that that implies in terms of foreign investment and export orders lost, higher costs of insurance and related matters.
However, the most lethal cost has been in terms of the destruction of our society’s social fabric with the polarisation, the violence and the extremism. It is not that the seeds of these conflicts were not there before 9/11, but certainly their fruition has been a direct result of the Pakistan leadership’s hasty embrace of the US War on Terror. The irony is that with all these costs, has the US shown an iota of understanding for the Pakistani nation’s predicament? The simple answer is “No2. Be it in terms of understanding our military’s limitations, our nation’s psyche, or our neighbour India’s historic designs on Pakistan, the US has simply not comprehended what Pakistan is all about.
Instead, it has tried one leadership after another, tried to broker political deals in order to push its own agendas and its vision of what Pakistan should be, and increased its aggressive approach towards this nation directly in proportion to its worsening position in Afghanistan. Somehow there is a feeling within the US decision makers that if they drag us down the road of their failures we will become as entrenched in a quagmire and more vulnerable to their imperial diktat.
The KLB is in a way a culmination of their neoimperialist approach to Pakistan which ironically increased in pace after the Obama takeover. Nor is Pakistan being isolated for such treatment. What is being done to us through the KLB has been done to many other US close “allies” before us and continues to be done to many others. Therefore it is good to understand the inherent imperialist trait that forms part of the American psyche. And the best way of understanding this is to see how the US continues to behave towards some of the states in Latin America which it has regarded as its own backyard since the days of the Monroe Doctrine when even the League of Nations was not allowed to intervene in dispute settlement in this region.
If we are concerned about the KLB conditionalities, let us look at the case of Colombia for instance, where in 2000 Clinton signed Public Law 106-246, which included $1.3 billion in aid to that country. Of course, unlike in the case of the KLB and Pakistan, the aid for Colombia was largely military.
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