Revamping American aid to Pakistan is expected in Bush report to Obama

The payments have been the source of increasing criticism on Capitol Hill and from independent review groups, which have concluded that Pakistan diverted much of the money to build up its forces against India.

Revamping the aid to the military was part of a three-month study of what has gone wrong in the seven-year war along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The study calls for a new and broadly regional approach to insurgencies that move freely across the mountainous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In the short term, it calls for continued covert strikes into Pakistani territory from Afghanistan, though the American military has been reluctant to repeat the kind of ground attack that led to an open exchange of fire with Pakistani border forces in September.

The report, which is expected to be presented to Obama’s top national security advisers in a week or two, was the product of a highly unusual strategy review that began in mid-September, just four months before President Bush leaves office.

“We’ve gone seven long years proclaiming that Pakistan was an ally and that it was doing everything we asked in the war on terror,” said one senior official involved in drafting the report. “And the truth is that $10 billion later, they still don’t have the basic capacity for counterinsurgency operations. What we are telling Obama and his people is that has to be reversed.” As a war that Bush once believed he had won came back to life in 2005 and 2006, the White House began a series of strategic reassessments, the most recent one reporting in the fall of 2006, just before the forced resignation of Donald H Rumsfeld as secretary of defense.

But those past studies looked primarily at the dynamics in Afghanistan. The current one, headed by the White House war czar, Lt General Douglas Lute, took a far broader view. The drafts prepared for the incoming Obama administration suggest that the United States has never focused sufficiently on nation-building, jobs creation, construction of schools and roads, and, most important, pushing the Pakistani government to focus on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency.

The report includes options, not “recommendations,” so that Obama would not be put in the position of endorsing or rejecting Bush’s suggested policies. It was completed just before the terrorist attacks in Mumbai and the reaction to those events is likely to complicate some of the central options even before they are handed off to Obama.

Though Pakistani officials regularly promised Bush, his intelligence chiefs and top American military officials that they would rout Al Qaeda and other militants from their sanctuary in Pakistan’s tribal areas, mountains of intelligence suggest that the country was playing both sides, financing the Taliban even while fighting them. The group accused of the Mumbai attacks, Lashkar-e-Taiba was essentially the creation of the Pakistani intelligence services, as a proxy to fight in Kashmir against India.

Asked about the study, a White House spokesman, Gordon D Johndroe, said: “We are concluding our review. We intend to pass it to the new team, since most policy adaptations would take place on their watch. This is another part of our efforts to ensure a smooth transition.”