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U.S. Plan To Counter Pakistan's Militants Is Threatened

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By JANE PERLEZ, The New York Times

Published: December 25, 2007

PESHAWAR, Pakistan - Weeks before it is to begin, an ambitious U.S. aid plan to counter militancy in Pakistan's tribal areas is threatened by important unresolved questions about who will monitor the money and whether it could fall into the wrong hands, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials and analysts familiar with the plan.

The disputes have left many skeptical that the $750 million five-year plan can succeed in competing for the allegiance of an estimated 400,000 young tribesmen in the restive tribal region, a mountainous swath of territory left destitute by British colonialists and ignored by successive Pakistani governments. Today, the Taliban, al-Qaida and other foreign militants use the area as a base to fuel violence and instability in Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan and to plot terrorist attacks abroad.

Critics of the aid plan say the region is rife with corruption, and even Pakistan's own government has limited reach there. The risk of leaving it isolated and undeveloped, though, is greater than ever. This month, Bush administration officials acknowledged they were reviewing their Afghan war plans from top to bottom.

The civilian aid program would provide jobs and schooling, build 600 miles of roads and improve literacy in an area where almost no women can read. It adds to the more than $1 billion in U.S. military aid to Pakistan annually - much of which does not make its way to frontline Pakistani units, some U.S. officials now acknowledge.

The tribal area for which this new money is intended remains so unsafe that no senior U.S. official has visited in the past nine months.

Fear Of Corruption

"My sense is they are ready to start, but who is going to be responsible for management?" said Rep. John F. Tierney, D-Mass., who serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and is one of several members of Congress who have begun pressing the State Department for details of how the civilian aid will be monitored. They said they had not received satisfactory answers.

The importance of the issue, they said, was underlined by the scores of investigations into corruption connected with vast amounts of money and equipment for reconstruction and strengthening Iraq's army and police forces that cannot be accounted for.

"We're not quite certain about it," Tierney said. "I have concerns that it not be a repeat of situations in Iraq."

In fact, wary of corruption and hamstrung by local hostility, U.S. officials say that, as in Iraq, they will rely heavily on private contractors to administer the development aid, a decision that could eat up as much as half the budget. Other proposals, like training a civilian conservation corps, have yet to gain traction.

The new program is meant to start slowly, with the first portion of the overall program out to bid at $350 million. Among the handful of companies invited to bid are DynCorp International and Creative Associates International Inc., both of which won substantial contracts in Iraq. How effective they will be in the tribal areas is equally uncertain.

Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, where large numbers of U.S. soldiers are on the ground to offer some protection to aid projects, the Pakistani authorities tightly control access to the tribal areas. The Pakistani military has suffered hundreds of casualties trying to subdue the area in the past few years, and heavy fighting has flared again in recent weeks.

Area Virtually Off-Limits

The region remains so dangerous that it is virtually off limits even to U.S. military officials and civilians who would oversee the programs. The Pakistani authorities have ruled out using foreign nonprofit groups, known as NGOs as shorthand for nongovernmental organizations. But neither do they approve the U.S. choice of private contractors. They would like the money to go through them.

"We are living in times when NGOs are considered to be all out to convert tribesmen," said Javed Iqbal, until recently the additional chief secretary of Federally Administered Tribal Areas, as the region is formally called. The title is a holdover from the British era.

"To deal with the tribesmen, you have to understand the tribes," Iqbal said. "You cannot ask a woman how frequently does she take contraception, which was one of the questions on an NGO questionnaire.

"The first reaction is going to box you in the face, and then tell you to get lost."

But Iqbal said he was convinced the for-profit companies would take a disproportionate amount of the program money. "Forty-eight percent of the program money goes to consultants," he said.

Rick Barton, a former official at the U.S. Agency for International Development, or AID, who now works on Pakistan issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the estimate was in the ballpark.

Development firms commonly charge 25 percent to 50 percent of a program's entire cost, depending on the scope and difficulty of the task, he said.

The task in difficult indeed. region of 3.2 million people has no industry, virtually no work and no hope. Men aged 18 to 25, who are the target of the program, find offers of 300 rupees a day from the Taliban - about $5 - attractive.

The men, almost entirely of the Pashtun tribe, have little in common with the rest of Pakistan.

"They are going to find pockets of opportunities," Barton said. "But will it be a lot of nice things that won't add up to much? Probably."

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