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.
In the space of one week, two studies – one on Pakistan and the other on Afghanistan – were released by two separate entities. The first study, Beyond Bullets and Bombs: Fixing the U.S. Approach to Development in Pakistan by Nancy Birdsall, Wren Elhai and Molly Kinder, was released after more than a year of work by a CGD-led study group on Pakistan.
This is a joint post with Wren Elhai and Molly Kinder and first appeared on ForeignPolicy.com’s AfPak Channel blog. Read the report of the Study Group on U.S. Development Strategy in Pakistan here. A response from Alexander Thier, head of USAID’s Office of Afghanistan and Pakistan Affairs can be found here.
For nearly two years, the United States has been trying something completely new in Pakistan. In 2009, with President Obama’s backing, Congress passed a bold piece of legislation that committed the United States to support Pakistan’s people and its economy, as opposed to focusing almost exclusively on the country’s military. The United States would try to help Pakistanis consolidate the transition to democracy they won in 2008, and -- for the first time -- it seemed the United States would place an equal emphasis on long-term development and short-term stability in Pakistan.
So far, however, this new approach has not lived up to its potential. During a recent trip to Pakistan, we listened to dozens of Pakistanis in and out of government tell us of their frustrations with the U.S. aid program and American inaction on trade and investment policies (just look at the ongoing debate about lifting tariffs on the Pakistani textile trade with the United States) that would naturally complement aid. Over the past year, a study group of American and Pakistani experts convened by the Center for Global Development have gathered to figure out what’s amiss—and how to put it right. In a report released today, we sum up the problem this way:
This is a joint post with Wren Elhai and Molly Kinder.
The news of Osama bin Laden’s death in a hideout in Pakistan raises fresh questions about the future of the U.S. development program in that country. That bin Laden was found in the army town of Abbottabad - the Pakistani equivalent of West Point -- has fueled suspicions that Pakistan’s leaders have been unhelpful at best and double dealing at worst. Some are asking: if Pakistan won’t help the United States, why should American taxpayers keep giving them so much foreign aid?
The United States has committed $1.5 billion per year over five years in an effort to support development in Pakistan, a fragile, nuclear-armed state of almost 190 million people that is in the frontline of the struggle against Islamic extremism. So, how’s that working out?
What do Pakistanis think of the United States’ ambitious development program in their country? Molly Kinder, Wren Elhai and I recently returned from what amounted to a two week listening tour of Pakistan (I was there for the second week). What we heard from a broad set of Pakistani officials, academics, journalists, and business people (as well as staff of other donor missions) was troubling.
Marc Grossman, a retired Ambassador and former Undersecretary of State, has courageously agreed to take up what the Brookings Institution’s Bruce Riedel has called “the worst job in the world”—Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Grossman will be asked to fill the massive shoes of the late Richard Holbrooke, the public face of the Obama administration’s civilian strategy in those two critically important countries.
As if Pakistan needed more troubles, this summer’s catastrophic flooding stretched the capacity of that country’s civilian government to the breaking point. How can the United States act to shore up a key ally and put a strategically critical country back on the path towards development and stability? My guest this week is Molly Kinder, a senior policy analyst here at the Center for Global Development.
This is a joint post with Wren Elhai.
Today on ForeignPolicy.com, we’ve written an op/ed with our colleague Molly Kinder that makes the case for why the United States should do everything possible to help Pakistan rebuild basic infrastructure in the areas devastated by this summer’s catastrophic floods. Here, we wanted to expand on one of the points from that op/ed—the debate over repurposing money from the existing $7.5 U.S. aid commitment, authorized a year ago by what’s called the Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill.
The question of how much can and should be repurposed from Kerry-Lugar-Berman is dividing policymakers in Congress and in the Obama administration. The House of Representatives has already passed a resolution that, among other things, “supports the use of funds authorized by [Kerry-Lugar-Berman] for the purposes of providing long-term recovery and rehabilitation for flood-affected areas and populations.”
Change in U.S. development policy has been a long time coming, but we expect to learn more details this week when President Obama speaks at the UN Millennium Development Goal Summit and the UN General Assembly. Change for CGD’s Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance Initiative similarly started back in January but embarks on a new chapter today too.