A top US official has signaled that there will be no major policy shift on Pakistan in the aftermath of elections that dealt a serious blow against the US-backed president there, Pervez Musharraf.
US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, in some of the most extensive remarks by a Bush administration official since the February 18 elections in Pakistan, said Washington would work with the new Pakistani government that will be formed in the coming weeks, but that the overall US approach will not change.
"There is a common United States and Pakistani interest in Pakistan's success in the robust and multifaceted fight against violent extremism, focused on democracy and economic development as well as on security cooperation. We plan to pursue that common interest vigorously with whatever government emerges from the election," Negroponte said during February 28 hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "Of course, President Musharraf is still the president of his country and we look forward to continuing to work well with him."
Senators from both parties said that the election results, which favored moderate opponents of Musharraf, offered the Bush administration an opportunity to recalibrate its policy toward Pakistan.
In particular, Senator Joseph Biden, a Democrat from Delaware, called on the United States to triple its non-military assistance to Pakistan from $500 million a year to $1.5 billion, and to provide a "democracy dividend" of an additional $1 billion a year. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the top Republican on the committee, said he supported Biden's proposal.
But Negroponte appeared lukewarm to Biden's plan. "It's a proposal we're looking at," he said. But he added that the Bush administration had just submitted its proposal for the next fiscal year to Congress and "I'm not in a position to say we should modify that."
Negroponte also suggested that there would be no change in the structure of US military assistance to Pakistan, which has been criticized for being mismanaged by Islamabad. Critics say that the aid $5.6 billion since 2002 is either going towards Pakistan's conventional military, oriented toward India, or being siphoned by corrupt military officials, or both.
Perhaps the most explicit admission that the Bush administration does not expect large changes in Pakistan was Negroponte's refusal to take a position on the reinstatement of judges dismissed by Musharraf at the end of last year, a move that has received widespread condemnation.
Negroponte was asked by Senator Russell Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin, about media reports that US diplomats have asked some of the winners of the Pakistani elections to hold back on their calls for reinstating the dismissed judges. Negroponte said the United States had no particular position on the question.
"On the question of judicial reform, we believe this is something the Pakistanis themselves are going to have to sort out, and I think it's something that will be taken up in their legislature and we'll watch that with interest," Negroponte said.
"We're certainly not trying to block changes of any particular kind, nor do we have any sort of prescription or formula for how they should go about reforming or improving their own judicial system," Negroponte continued.
When Feingold pressed him to state the US policy on the judges' reinstatement, Negroponte replied, "We have been silent on the subject."
That position drew a rebuke from another Democrat on the committee, Barbara Boxer of California. "I'm very disturbed by your seeming ambivalence about an independent judiciary. We're spending billions of dollars in Iraq to set up a judiciary. This president [Musharraf] dismissed the judiciary."
The United States is unlikely to move away from its policy of dealing primarily with Musharraf until the president loses his influence with the military, said Daniel Markey, a former State Department official, and now a senior fellow for India, Pakistan and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations.
"I think there's a certain amount of trepidation, or risk aversion to taking any precipitous action politically with regard to Pakistan. There are a lot of calls now in
Editor's note:
Joshua Kucera is a Washington, DC,-based freelance writer who specializes in security issues in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East.
