Jay Currie

After the United States has spent more than $5 billion in a largely failed effort to bolster the Pakistani military effort against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, some American officials now acknowledge that there were too few controls over the money. The strategy to improve the Pakistani military, they said, needs to be completely revamped.

In interviews in Islamabad and Washington, Bush administration and military officials said they believed that much of the American money was not making its way to frontline Pakistani units. Money has been diverted to help finance weapons systems designed to counter India, not Al Qaeda or the Taliban, the officials said, adding that the United States has paid tens of millions of dollars in inflated Pakistani reimbursement claims for fuel, ammunition and other costs. nyt

The cardinal error of the Bush view of Pakistan was to treat the “tribal areas” as part of the sovereign state of Pakistan when, in fact, Pakistan could not project its sovereignty into those areas. Instead, the central government in Pakistan cut deals with the assorted fundamentalist/Islamofascist/Taliban folks who were running those areas.

The right approach would have been to declare the tribal areas “ungoverned” and then used whatever force was required to clear them of the assorted Islamist bandits who have been attacking both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The softly, softly approach to a military dictator in Pakistan has yet to make America or the West a single friend in that wretched nation. It was a mistake and, unfortunately one which the next Administration will have to deal with. Meanwhile, Canadians, denied the chance to use hot pursuit to chase the Taliban down in the tribal areas, lose man after man to an artificial conflict.