Last year my former colleagues Molly Kinder and Wren Elhai joined Nancy Birdsall for a listening tour in Pakistan that sought to gather input from a range of experts for CGD’s June 2011 report on the U.S. assistance program there.
“Better late than never” has never been truer. Recent reports (Financial Times, Reuters) indicate that the European Union (EU) is on the verge of reducing tariffs on a range of Pakistani exports for two to three years.
One of the main take-aways from CGD’s June 2011 study group report on Pakistan is that, when it comes to development assistance, the U.S. government has suffered from a lack of transparency about what it is doing, how much it is spending, and what it is achieving.
The question of whether and how much aid Pakistan will receive has been a hotly contested issue in Congress this year, with some members having called for civilian assistance (authorized under the Kerry-Lugar-Berman legislation) to be cut altogether.
It’s hard to get anything done in most developing countries if you don’t know your way around. Although it seems obvious, aid agencies often overlook the basic fact that effective development programs require experienced staff who know the local context and who have forged working relationships with key interlocutors. It was in this spirit that the report of our study group on the U.S. development strategy in Pakistan criticized USAID, claiming that it was “neither empowered nor equipped to succeed”.
The Senate Appropriations Committee passed its FY2012 Foreign Operations bill last week (September 21st).
As Congress returns to DC from its summer recess, it comes back to a long “to do” list. On the foreign policy front, one pressing item is what to do with our Pakistan assistance program. And from where things stand now, it looks like the funds appropriated for Pakistan this year under the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act (aka the Kerry-Lugar-Berman Bill) may be both reduced in volume and tied to security conditions.
On August 13th, an American aid worker named Warren Weinstein was kidnapped from his home in an upscale neighborhood in Lahore. According to news reports, he was employed by JE Austin, a consulting firm based in Arlington, VA.
