In Pakistan, debate over U.S. money

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - When U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke arrives in Pakistan today, he will be publicly celebrated for President Obama's pledge of massive long-term aid, but privately will hear complaints about U.S. pressure to do more to root out extremists.

Pakistan - while eager for the funds to shore up its faltering economy and develop its ability to counter insurgents - is honing a list of questions that highlight significant differences over the right way to combat al-Qaeda and its regional allies, officials and analysts say.

Holbrooke, Washington's special representative for the region, is arriving after Obama labeled Pakistan's border region "the most dangerous place in the world" for America because of the terrorists it houses, "almost certainly" including Osama bin Laden.

Obama has warned that the pledge of $7.5 billion in civilian aid over five years will be forthcoming only if Pakistan demonstrates its commitment to uprooting al-Qaeda and other violent extremists.

Islamabad points to the hundreds of Pakistani troops killed in militant attacks or in a series of ill-fated operations along the Afghan border since Pakistan dropped its support for the Taliban in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

"We have sacrificed our soldiers. We have sacrificed our economy. What else do they want?" Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani said.

What Washington says it wants is better cooperation from Pakistan's powerful but reluctant security establishment, especially the key Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

After months of leaks to U.S. newspapers, Holbrooke; Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, who is accompanying Holbrooke; and other U.S. officials have in the last week gone public with allegations that the ISI has sustained links with - and perhaps secretly aided - some militant groups, an assertion denied by Islamabad.

There is also little doubt that Washington expects stepped-up Pakistani military operations this year to complement those by the expanding U.S. forces in southern and eastern Afghanistan.

Asif Ali Zardari, the pro-Western president atop Pakistan's year-old civilian government, has described Obama's aid pledge as "an endorsement of our call for economic and social uplift as a means to fight extremism."

More precisely, the U.S. money, and billions more expected from other donors meeting in Tokyo on April 17, will help avert a sharper deterioration of Pakistan's economy, ravaged by inflation and the flight of foreign investors.

Analysts say discussion of up to $3 billion in aid over the same period to boost Pakistan's counterinsurgency forces will also go down well.

As well as boosting the army, the new package will "build up the paramilitary and police forces, which is quite critical to holding areas that the military clears," said Shuja Nawaz, director of the U.S.-based Atlantic Council.

David Petraeus, the four-star general overseeing the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, last week encouraged Congress to approve the aid package, saying it would help convince Pakistan of America's long-term commitment - reducing the temptation for Pakistan to hedge its bets in case of U.S. and NATO failure in Afghanistan.

But that hope is eroded by the yet-to-be-elaborated conditions attached to the promised financial aid.

"There are some aspects of the new policy that we would ask the U.S. to elaborate and others where we would hope for some modification," said Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to Washington.

A senior Pakistani official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, went further.

"We think they [the Americans] should decide once and for all if they want a strategic relationship or a transactional relationship," he said.

A suicide bomber struck a Shiite mosque yesterday near Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, killing 22 people, in an apparent effort to stir up sectarian strife in the majority Sunni country far from its militant-infested badlands on the Afghan border.

The attack took place in Chakwal, 60 miles south of Islamabad. It came less than 24 hours after eight paramilitary troops were killed in a bombing in the capital, and six days after militants stormed a police training center in the eastern city of Lahore.

A Taliban-linked group claimed responsibility for yesterday's bombing, which occurred at the entrance to a Shiite mosque packed with worshipers.

John Solecki, the American U.N. official freed from two months of captivity in the hands of abductors in Pakistan, left the country on a special medical flight yesterday.

Pakistan's Interior Minister Rehman Malik said Solecki would fly to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan and then continue on to the United States.

Solecki, 49, of South Orange, N.J., has worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees since 1991. He was heading up the agency's refugee operations in Quetta when he was abducted Feb. 2 in an ambush that killed his driver.

He was found Saturday near the Afghan border in western Pakistan unharmed, but with his hands and feet bound. UNHCR officials said that besides being treated for an ongoing medical condition, which they would not disclose, Solecki was tired but in decent health. - Inquirer wire services

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