Frustrated with Pakistan not heeding repeated calls to go the whole hog against terror outfits operating from its soil, the United States is actively considering the possibility of denying $255 million in military aid to Islamabad, after having indefinitely delayed its disbursement last August.
Citing US officials, The New York Times reported on Saturday that the Trump administration is “strongly considering” withholding the large aid tranche for good “as a show of dissatisfaction with Pakistan’s broader intransigence toward confronting the terrorist networks that operate there”. A final decision is expected to be taken in the coming weeks.
A new irritant in the relations is reported to be Islamabad’s rejection of US requests for access to a Haqqani network militant who was captured by Pakistani forces in October while freeing a Canadian-American family that had been held hostage for five years.
Freeing of the family has been lauded by Trump as “a positive movement for our country’s relationship with Pakistan”, but that confidence is seen to have been undermined in recent weeks by the rejection of the US request for access to the captured militant.
From President Trump downwards, Washington has been stepping up pressure on Islamabad over the past many months, highlighting the periodic Congressional anger over the US aid largesse over the years that is put at more than $33 billion in economic and military assistance since 2002
“We make massive payments every year to Pakistan. They have to help,” Trump bluntly stated while unveiling his national security strategy last week. Back in summer, he had fumed at Pakistan as a country that “gives safe haven to agents of chaos, violence and terror”.
last week, Vice President Mike Pence, making a surprise visit to Afghanistan, told American troops: “President Trump has put Pakistan on notice.”
And on Thursday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson drummed home the message once more to Islamabad that it has got to go after the terror groups. He offered American help to defeat the outfits if only Pakistan demonstrated its desire to partner with the US in this quest.
There have been strong suggestions in recent months that the Trump administration should strip Pakistan’s status as a major non-NATO ally in retaliation for its failure to cooperate on counter-terrorism measures.
Interestingly enough, a proposal of the kind was made by no less a person than former Pakistani Ambassador to the US Husain Haqqani back in February in a report that he co-authored with lisa Curtis, former South Asia specialist at the Heritage Foundation who joined the White House in June as Senior Director for South and Central Asia.
In the report, Haqqani and Curtis had, among other things, noted: “As a first step, the US must warn Pakistan that its status as a Major Non-NATO Ally (MNNA) is in serious jeopardy.
Unless Pakistan takes immediate steps to demonstrate that it fully shares US counterterrorism objectives, the US will revoke its MNNA status within six months.”
