US cuts $1.5bn in aid to Pakistan

The Trump administration yesterday suspended more than $US1.2bn ($1.5bn) in security assistance to Pakistan.

Pakistanis burn the US flag in Quetta on Thursday. Picture: AFP

The Trump administration yesterday suspended more than $US1.2 billion ($1.5bn) in security assistance to Pakistan, making good its threat to punish its ostensible ally in the war on terrorism for continuing to provide safe haven to militants who attack US forces in Afghanistan.

The action will likely spark ­retaliation from Islamabad, which hinted this week it could block air and land supply routes into ­Afghanistan and its 14,000 US troops there, as it did in 2012, and withhold intelligence and military co-operation with the US in its war on terror if its efforts were not appreciated.

The latest crisis in the relationship reflects a cycle of blame, punishment and retreat that has inevitably led the US to the same conclusion — that it is better to keep nuclear-armed Pakistan within the fold than outside of it.

Tensions between the US and Pakistan have been rising since August when Donald Trump put Pakistan “on notice” it needed to do more to combat militancy and terrorism. They climaxed this week after the US President accused Islamabad in a New Year’s Day tweet of receiving billions in US counter-terrorism aid while harbouring ­terrorists.

US State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said yesterday the administration would freeze all security assistance to Pakistan, not just the $US255 million in already deferred military aid confirmed earlier this week, until Islamabad took decisive ­action against militant groups such as the Afghan Taliban and ­allied Haqqani network.

It is believed the suspension will also include up to $US1bn in Coalition Support Funds that reimburse Pakistan for costs incurred in its counter-terrorism ­effort. It will not apply to civilian assistance programs.

Ms Nauert said some ­exceptions could be made “on a case-by-case basis if determined to be critical to national security interests”.

“Pakistan has the ability to get this money back in the future, but they have to take decisive action,” she said.

The State Department also placed Pakistan on a special watch list for severe violations of ­religious freedoms.

Pakistani leaders have responded angrily to US threats and criticism this week and pointed to the country’s “huge sacrifices” in the war on terror.

“You ask what we’ve done? From our bases you carried out 57,800 attacks on Afghanistan ... thousands of our civilians and soldiers became victims of the war initiated by you,” Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif tweeted late on Thursday.

Ahead of the US aid freeze, Pakistan Defence Minister Khurram Dastgir Khan noted that US operations in Afghanistan would be seriously hampered without access to Pakistan’s airspace and land routes.

Pakistan closed those routes for eight months in November 2011 after US military strikes killed more than two dozen Pakistani soldiers along the Afghanistan border, and months after US Navy SEALs raided Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani hide-out.

The shutdown forced the US and its allies to divert some supplies through a northern land route across Central Asia, a problematic alternative given the need to obtain Russian permission in some parts, though in the end most supplies were flown in at vast expense.

C. Christine Fair, an associate professor at Georgetown University security studies program, said the aid freeze was “good news as an opening salvo” but it was unclear how the US would navigate another possible supply route shutdown.

In an article for Foreign Policy, Professor Fair suggested a more effective sanction would be for the US to end its support for International Monetary Fund bailouts to Pakistan, given future IMF payments would inevitably be used to service repayments to the very Chinese loans that have made Islamabad less fearful of US aid cuts.

But the US was unlikely to pursue that course because Pakistan had “essentially developed its bargaining power by threatening its own demise”.

“With any economic collapse of Pakistan, Washington again fears that the spectre of a nuclear-armed terrorist group rising up from Pakistan will materialise.”