cato-at-liberty.org: Pakistan: More Aid, More Waste, More Fraud?

Posted by Doug Bandow

Pakistan long has tottered on the edge of being a failed state:  created amidst a bloody partition from India, suffered under ineffective democratic rule and disastrous military rule, destabilized through military suppression of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) by dominant West Pakistan, dismembered in a losing war with India, misgoverned by a corrupt and wastrel government, linked to the most extremist Afghan factions during the Soviet occupation, allied with the later Taliban regime, and now destabilized by the war in Afghanistan.  Along the way the regime built nuclear weapons, turned a blind eye to A.Q. Khan’s proliferation market, suppressed democracy, tolerated religious persecution, elected Asif Ali “Mr. Ten Percent” Zardari as president, and wasted billions of dollars in foreign (and especially American) aid.
Still the aid continues to flow.  But even the Obama administration has some concerns about ensuring that history does not repeat itself.  Reports the New York Times:

As the United States prepares to triple its aid package to Pakistan — to a proposed $1.5 billion over the next year — Obama administration officials are debating how much of the assistance should go directly to a government that has been widely accused of corruption, American and Pakistani officials say. A procession of Obama administration economic experts have visited Islamabad, the capital, in recent weeks to try to ensure both that the money will not be wasted by the government and that it will be more effective in winning the good will of a public increasingly hostile to the United States, according to officials involved with the project.
…The overhaul of American assistance, led by the State Department, comes amid increased urgency about an economic crisis that is intensifying social unrest in Pakistan, and about the willingness of the government there to sustain its fight against a raging insurgency in the northwest. It follows an assessment within the Obama administration that the amount of nonmilitary aid to the country in the past few years was inadequate and favored American contractors rather than Pakistani recipients, according to several of the American officials involved.

Rather than pouring more good money after bad, the U.S. should lift tariff barriers on Pakistani goods.  What the Pakistani people need is not more misnamed “foreign aid” funneled through corrupt and inefficient bureaucracies, but jobs.  Trade, not aid, will help create real, productive work, rather than political patronage positions.

Second, Islamabad needs to liberalize its own economy.  As P.T. Bauer presciently first argued decades ago–and as is widely recognized today–the greatest barriers to development in poorer states is internal.  Countries like Pakistan make entrepreneurship, business formation, and job creation well-nigh impossible.  Business success requires political influence.  The result is poverty and, understandably, political and social unrest.  More than a half century experience with foreign “aid” demonstrates that money from abroad at best masks the consequences of underdevelopment.  More often such transfers actually hinder development, by strengthening the very governments and policies which stand in the way of economic growth.
Even military assistance has been misused.  Reported the New York Times two years ago:

After the United States has spent more than $5 billion in a largely failed effort to bolster the Pakistani military effort against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, some American officials now acknowledge that there were too few controls over the money. The strategy to improve the Pakistani military, they said, needs to be completely revamped. In interviews in Islamabad and Washington, Bush administration and military officials said they believed that much of the American money was not making its way to frontline Pakistani units. Money has been diverted to help finance weapons systems designed to counter India, not Al Qaeda or the Taliban, the officials said, adding that the United States has paid tens of millions of dollars in inflated Pakistani reimbursement claims for fuel, ammunition and other costs.

Writing blank checks to regimes like that in Pakistan is counterproductive in the long term.  Extremists pose a threat less because they offer an attractive alternative and more because people are fed up with decades of misrule by the existing authorities.  Alas, U.S. “aid” not only buttresses those authorities, but ties America to them, transferring their unpopularity to Washington.  The administration needs do better than simply toss more money at the same people while hoping that they will do better this time.