Bin Laden Mission Prompts Lawmakers to Rethink Aid to Pakistan
By Emily Cadei, CQ Staff
Even as they celebrated the military raid that killed Osama bin Laden, lawmakers turned their attention to Pakistan and called for renewed scrutiny of the billions of dollars in aid Washington provides Islamabad each year.
“Several factors warrant a reassessment of U.S. aid to Pakistan, and this is one of them,” said Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., the chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee responsible for foreign aid.
One of his fellow appropriators — Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, D-N.J. — even called for the United States to suspend aid altogether.
The fact that the al Qaeda mastermind was located and killed in a large compound less than 100 miles from the Pakistani capital raised questions for members of Congress, some of whom already are clamoring for answers. The response they receive could affect long-term U.S.-Pakistan relations, they say.
“There are going to be a lot of questions raised here in Congress about what people in the Pakistan intelligence agencies in particular knew or should have known about the presence of bin Laden in Pakistan itself,” Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said at a news conference Monday.
“This is going to be a time of real pressure” on Pakistani officials, Lieberman said, “to basically prove to us that they didn’t know that bin Laden was there.”
Rep. Adam B. Schiff, a member of the House Intelligence Committee and the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees foreign assistance, agreed.
“I think depending on what level of cooperation we received and the effort to investigate this compound and how much the Pakistanis knew could have a significant effect” on how Congress views future aid, Schiff, D-Calif., said in an interview.
In its fiscal 2012 budget request, the State Department is seeking $3 billion in foreign assistance to Islamabad, much of it part of a $7.5 billion, multi-year economic development package authorized in 2009. The Defense Department requested $2.3 billion in coalition support funds in fiscal 2012 to bankroll Pakistani counterterrorism efforts.
Strong Doubts
Some in Congress are not even waiting for an investigation before calling on the United States to block that flow of funds.
“Before we send another dime, we need to know whether Pakistan truly stands with us in the fight against terrorism,” Lautenberg said in a statement. “Until Congress and the American public are assured that the Pakistani government is not shielding terrorists, financial aid to Pakistan should be suspended.”
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the ranking member on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs panel, did not call for a complete halt to U.S. funding for Pakistan, but said Congress should consider attaching more strings to the military aid it provides as a way “to keep the pressure on Pakistan.”
The Obama administration is urging restraint.
Asked at a news conference how the United States could still have confidence in Pakistan’s commitment to fighting terrorism, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton countered that Pakistan has “contributed greatly to our efforts to dismantle al Qaeda.”
“In fact, cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound in which he was hiding,” Clinton said. “Going forward, we are absolutely committed to continuing that cooperation.”
The White House’s counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, was more circumspect about Pakistan’s role in a briefing later in the day. “I think people are raising a number of questions and understandably so,” Brennan said. “We are looking right now at how he was able to hold out there for so long.”
Brennan said it was “inconceivable that bin Laden did not have a support system in the country,” but declined to speculate on whether that support included Pakistani officials.
And like Clinton, Brennan maintained that the U.S.-Pakistan “partnership is critical to breaking the back of al Qaeda.”
Some Influential Defenders
Many in Congress also appear to have concluded that cooperation with Pakistan, however flawed, remains essential to combatting terrorism as well as finding a solution to the war in Afghanistan.
“We have to remember there are still equities that we have in Pakistan as it relates to our national security,” said House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich. “It’s incredibly important for us that we maintain a relationship so that we can pursue these targets that we know are posing a threat to the U.S. It’s a balance, and we’ll have to work through it.”
And one senior congressional aide cautioned that bin Laden’s compound may not have been as easy to spot as it appears now.
“You have to remember that the rich in Pakistan and many parts of the developing world live in huge, protected compounds,” the aide said. “The fact that it was relatively close to an Army base wouldn’t necessarily indicate any Pakistani complicity.”
Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., noted in an interview on MSNBC that Islamabad has “allowed us to do a lot” to combat terrorists in Pakistan.
“We’ve been allowed to have a lot of these people on the ground who were able to do some of this tracking and analysis. We have been allowed to do a lot of drone strikes, which, up until now, put enormous pressure on al Qaeda,” Kerry said.
One of the authors of the 2009 aid package to Pakistan (PL 111-73), Kerry has long been an advocate for stronger economic and diplomatic relations. He continues to oppose cuts to financial assistance to Pakistan, an aide said Monday, and prefers that the U.S. instead consider trying to increase people-to-people contact, one of the aims of the 2009 package.
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former senior official under Presidents George Bush and George W. Bush, predicted that the latest developments will simply perpetuate what has long been a dysfunctional relationship.
“If history is any guide, the shakeout from this will be both temporary and incomplete. This will add to the narrative on each side that notes the imperfections in the bilateral relationship,” Haass said in a call with reporters. “This has been, is, and will remain one of the most fraught and complicated and difficult bilateral relationships that exists in the world today.”
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