• by Danielle Kurtzleben (washington)
• Tuesday, May 19, 2009
• Inter Press Service

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the provision Tuesday of 110 million dollars in humanitarian aid to assist the mounting number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Pakistan.

The money is largely to be provided by the State Department, with 10 million dollars coming from the Department of Defence, and will be used mostly for the purchase of food and emergency supplies.

The IDP situation in Pakistan stems from recent Pakistani military attacks on Taliban militants who seized control of the Swat Valley in February. At the urging of the U.S., the Pakistani army has in recent weeks moved ahead aggressively against the Taliban militants, despite the Pakistani army’s decided lack of experience in counterinsurgency operations.

David Kilcullen, the strategist behind the U.S. troop surge in Iraq, has noted the Pakistani military’s low chances of success in its operations.

'The Pakistani military has really no capability for what we could call counterinsurgency,' Kilcullen warned in the Financial Times last week. 'What they are doing in the Swat Valley is a conventional offensive against the main-force Taliban... They need a more sophisticated approach and they need training and assistance, which they are currently refusing.'

Kilcullen also predicted that the residents of Swat would bear the price of a poorly conceived military offensive. He said the Pakistani army 'will move into Swat, they will fight the Taliban, there will be half a million refugees, there will be immense dislocation.'

It would appear that Kilcullen was right, as the residents of the Swat Valley and Buner find themselves caught between Taliban shooting and government bombing.

F.B. Ali, a retired brigadier general in the Pakistani Army, places more blame upon U.S. policy. 'The U.S. has pressured Pakistan into engaging in brutal military operations in Bajaur and Swat with no regard for how this would affect its own vital interests in the region,' Ali wrote on the blog of former U.S. military intelligence officer Col. Pat Lang.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says that over one million people have fled the northwestern regions of Pakistan, where the fighting is taking place, and that these IDPs are in addition to the 555,000 that had already been displaced by fighting since August.

On Tuesday, Clinton was more liberal with the numbers, putting the figure of total Pakistani IDPs at 'approximately two million'.

To help alleviate this situation, U.S. humanitarian aid is intended to address a multitude of problems. The 110 million dollars comes on top of 60 million already provided by the U.S. for the IDP situation since last August, and in addition to other funding for Pakistan currently making its way through Congress.

Clinton said that this new aid package would be distributed through international relief efforts. 'We're going to be providing a lot of in-kind contributions and we're going to be providing financial support to multilateral organisations and NGOs,' she said, emphasising the Pakistani role in resolving its problems, hoping to ensure that 'the people of Pakistan have a stake in solving this humanitarian crisis'.

Clinton further emphasised that the U.S. aid effort would amount to far more than mere supplies, also providing a boost to the Pakistani economy. 'It should also be an investment in the people and the economy of Pakistan. So a significant portion of our pledged food aid will go to buy Pakistani grain in local markets,' she said.

Clinton noted the broad spectrum of areas the aid was meant to address, saying, 'We will work to create quick-impact job programmes that will put Pakistanis to work, making supplies that will help their countrymen who have been forced to flee the fighting.'

All this takes place alongside what appears to be a campaign for the trust of the Pakistani people. In an address to the Pakistani parliament, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani expressed the need to win the war politically as well as militarily – to 'win the hearts and minds of the people'.

John Kerry, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, echoed these sentiments Tuesday. Expressing approval for the U.S. aid package, he said in a statement that 'for the sake of the national security of both of our nations, we seek to demonstrate to the people of Pakistan that we are friends in fair and foul weather alike.'

A common Pakistani critique of the country’s relationship with the U.S. has been that the U.S. has only been generous with aid at times when Pakistan has been strategically important to Washington's aims.

U.S. aid to Pakistan under the administration of former President George W. Bush was largely based on the notion of Pakistan, under the military dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf, as an ally in the 'global war on terror'. The billions in aid during Bush’s tenure were almost all allocated as military aid.

Pakistan’s army has controlled the government for much of the country’s existence since its independence 62 years ago. After Musharraf fell into unpopularity in late 2007, a civilian government was voted into power in elections in early 2008.

But such politicking must come as cold comfort for the hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis packed into refugee tent camps. Despite repeated government assurances, some Pakistanis doubt the sincerity of their government’s attempts to fight the Taliban.

'The army and the Taliban are not killing each other – they are friends,' a refugee woman told the New York Times last week. 'They are only killing civilians.'

Indeed, the Pakistani army has been widely accused of bolstering militant groups when it was convenient to those in power, as well as supporting militant groups to form a bulwark against India in the disputed Kashmir region.

Despite the difficulties of winning 'hearts and minds', not to mention the obvious U.S. strategic interests in the region, Clinton Tuesday summed up the situation in simple moral terms: 'The humanitarian relief is the right thing to do, no matter what the politics.'

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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