by Shiza Shahid
The Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009 passed in the US Congress on September 30 and is on its way to President Obama. The debate in Pakistan about the bill has reignited with fury. The arguments are being dominated by the critics, most of whom are “frothing-at-the-mouth angry,” says Cyril Almeida, a Pakistani columnist with a sense of humor; he goes on to aptly describe the domestic feeling: “A PPP government has once again sold the country, its sovereignty, its very soul to the Yanks.”
One such angry critic is Muzaffar Iqbal, a freelance columnist who wrote in Pakistan’s The News that the bill is “turning Pakistan into a client state”, infringing upon its sovereignty by allowing the US to monitor Pakistan in a manner unprecedented in the spheres of economic policy, military strategy and social development. “The act binds Pakistan to America in the realms of its national existence in a manner and to the extent that has never existed before.” Iqbal closes his article with a dire warning “This road to Washington will clearly turn the qibla [direction of prayer] of this nation and within one generation, all that has accumulated in the spiritual and intellectual realms through a millennium of slow and organic growth of a civilization, will be Americanized.”
Clearly, the anger and fear surrounding this bill is rather exaggerated. While there are conditions applying to the $1.5.billion in aid authorized by the bill, these conditions do not impact economic and social sovereignty of Pakistan and only apply to security-related assistance and major defense transfers – a key fact which the critics fail to point out. The basis for these conditions rests in Sec 6, paragraph (c) of the Bill which demands that Pakistan must certify to congress that it is cooperating with U.S. goals in certain ways: combating terrorism, preventing the territory of Pakistan from being used as a base for attacks on Al-Qaeda, and not interfering with the democratic development of the country. These conditions are not quite the “client state” scenario that Iqbal describes. However, the anger is not entirely stage-drama, and some of what irks the critics can be found between the lines. Importantly, there are implicit references to India’s security in the bill, mentioning the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammad in the context of “neighboring countries” and requiring Pakistan to make “concerted efforts” to curb the activities of these groups. References to India’s security in an aid bill by the U.S. are only bound to arouse feelings of anger and discrimination within its enemy state. Moreover, a lot of the anger is not based on what is being said, but on who is saying it and how; as Almeida describes, the language and the structure of the bill reinforces the underlying fact: “we remain a tactical ally of the US, not a strategic partner.”
Flickr photo by the U.S. Army used under a Creative Commons license
