The Bush administration on Monday signalled that it would probably keep billions of dollars flowing to Pakistan’s military, despite the detention of human rights advocates and leaders of the political opposition by General Pervez Musharraf.In carefully calibrated public statements and blunter private acknowledgments about the limits of American leverage over General Musharraf, the man President Bush has called one of his most critical allies, officials argued that it would be counterproductive to let Pakistan’s political turmoil interfere with their best hope of ousting al-Qaeda’s central leadership and the Taliban from the country’s mountainous tribal areas. Speaking to reporters in Jerusalem, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that while the United States would “have to review the situation with aid,” she said three times that President Bush’s first concern was “to protect America and protect American citizens by continuing to fight against terrorists.”“That means we have to be very cognizant of the counterterrorism operations that we are involved in,” she said. “We have to be very cognizant of the fact that some of the assistance that has been going to Pakistan is directly related to the counterterrorism mission.”In Islamabad, aides to General Musharraf — who had dismissed pleas on Friday from Rice and Adm. William J. Fallon, the senior military commander in the Middle East, to avoid the state-of-emergency declaration — said they had anticipated that there would be few real consequences. They called the American reaction “muted,” saying General Musharraf had not received phone calls of protest from Bush or other senior American officials. In unusually candid terms, they said American officials supported stability over democracy.“They would rather have a stable Pakistan, albeit with some restrictive norms, than have more democracy prone to fall in the hands of extremists,” said Tariq Azim Khan, the Minister of State for Information. “Given the choice, I know what our friends would choose.” It was a sign of their confidence that Pakistani officials announced that parliamentary elections set for January might be delayed for as long as a year. Just before she learned of that announcement, Rice said, “We have a very clear view that the elections need to take place on time, which would mean the beginning of the year.”Visiting Beijing today, Defence Secretary Robert M. Gates said the United States was reviewing its programmes for military assistance to Pakistan, although he noted that the Bush administration also would take into serious consideration the need to continue counter-terrorism efforts in the region. In Washington, officials acknowledged that they were trying to balance the American insistence that Pakistan remain on the path to democracy and General Musharraf’s unwillingness to risk chaos that would allow al-Qaeda and the Taliban to operate more freely. “The equities in Pakistan are huge,” said a senior official deeply involved in trying to persuade General Musharraf to fulfill his promise to hold elections and run the country as a civilian leader. “We’ve got US and NATO troops dying in Afghanistan, and a war on terrorism” that cannot be halted while General Musharraf tries to shore up his powers, he said. President Bush has made spreading democracy a major foreign policy theme and his administration has quietly pushed General Musharraf for months to be more open to sharing power, going so far as to help broker talks between him and Benazir Bhutto, the leader of Pakistan’s largest opposition party. But Bush has said nothing in public about General Musharraf’s latest action. While the total dollar amount of American aid to Pakistan is unclear, a study published in August by the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated it to be “at least $10 billion in Pakistan since 9/11, excluding covert funds.” Sixty per cent of that has gone to “Coalition Support Funds,” essentially direct payments to the Pakistani military, and 15 per cent to purchase major weapons systems. Another 15 per cent has been for general budget support for the Pakistani government; only 10 per cent for development or humanitarian assistance.
