**Hmmmmmm, would be intersting to find out where all the funding went.
US wants to know where its ‘Tsunami’ for Pak funding has gone**
Islamabad, June 2 : A report prepared by a U.S. agency has raised questions about the whereabouts of American military aid to Pakistan.
According to the Centre for Public Integrity’s International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), U.S. military aid to Pakistan in the first three years after 9/11 increased by 45,000 per cent, growing from nine million dollars in the three years before the terrorist strike to more than four billion dollars in the three years after.
Human rights activists, critics of the Pakistani government and members of Congress all want to know where the money, totalling in billions has gone.
The U.S. State Department rates Pakistan’s human rights record as poor having a long list of abuses. The report claims that the U.S. largesse has been put to abusive purposes, including to buy weapons that have been used against Pakistani civilians and to offer bounties on suspected militants, the US is seeking.
The US military aid to Pakistan since 9/11 terrorists attacks includes almost five billion dollars in Coalition Support Funds (CSF), a programme controlled by the Defence Department to reimburse key allies in the global war on terror.
Pakistan also benefited from other funding mechanisms set up in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Pakistan was the third-largest recipient of the Pentagon’s new Regional Defense Counter Terrorism Fellowship Programme.
Over 23 million dollars was earmarked for Pakistan in fiscal 2006 for “Improving Counter Terrorism Strike Capabilities” under another new Pentagon programme referred to as Section 1206 training, which allows the Pentagon to use a portion of its annual funding from the Congress to train and equip foreign militaries. Pakistan finished first in the race for this new Pentagon-controlled training.
This enormous funding reflects Pakistan’s key role in the US global war on terror. Just after 9/11, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf made a commitment to align his regime with the US, as it went after Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Craig Cohen, the co-author of a recent Centre for Strategic and International Study on US aid to Pakistan, wanted to know whether CSF money is "intended to yield some sort of specific action on the part of the government."He said, “If so, then government clearly has no oversight.”
** Olga Oliker, an expert on the US defence policy and co-author of a recent RAND think tank report on the human rights performance of internal security forces in South Asia, said she’s concerned that US-made weapons that go to Pakistani security forces and US training that the forces receive are being used against civilian populations. **
