More Harm Than Good?

For those who have been paying attention, it is no surprise that the Pakistani government has ties to terrorist organizations such as the Haqqani network and Lashkar-e-Taiba through its Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Indeed, Pakistan's "double game" – in which the country serves simultaneously as a military partner of the U.S. and a patron of its enemies – has been evident since the very beginning of the war in Afghanistan. But only recently, following the withdrawal of most U.S. forces from Afghanistan, has the U.S. government seriously begun to consider withholding substantial amounts of aid from Pakistan over its double-dealing.

Washington would certainly have grounds for doing so based on Pakistan's behavior alone. But it's also worth asking precisely how effective the aid that has been rendered to date has been.

The answer isn't encouraging. Over the past decade, escalating levels of American aid to Pakistan has uniformly failed to achieve its intended objective – to support the country's counterterrorism efforts, specifically against the Taliban and its allies active in Afghanistan. Since 2002, U.S. aid to Pakistan (both economic-related assistance and security-related assistance) has averaged roughly $2 billion per year. That figure is impressive; by way of context, it bears noting that over the last two decades, Pakistan's annual defense budget has averaged around $5 billion.

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And yet by virtually every metric, terrorism has gotten markedly worse in both Afghanistan and in Pakistan. Consider that in the same year that it dispersed its most generous aid package ever to Pakistan ($4.5 billion in 2010), the U.S. suffered its highest level of casualties in Afghanistan (499). Meanwhile, terrorism-related deaths in Pakistan jumped from 189 in 2003 to 11,704 in 2009 and 5,496 in 2014.

But the situation is even worse. American officials admit that Pakistan uses U.S. defense technology to assist terrorist groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba against India, while the effectiveness of any security assistance it has rendered to the United States is limited by poorly trained and poorly equipped personnel. Additionally, the Pakistani government inflates the amount it spends on counterterrorism operations in order to receive more aid. According to some U.S. military officials, legitimate costs account for only 30 percent of the money Pakistan has requested for its efforts.

Nor has Pakistan's economy received a significant boost from the aid. According to World Bank data, Pakistan's average gross domestic product growth rate from 2010-2014 (3.54 percent) was considerably lower than in the preceding the five-year period of 2005-2009 (when it stood at 4.83 percent), despite a substantial increase in U.S. economic aid over the past several years. Long-term trends don't look encouraging, either. Islamabad spends less than 3 percent of its GDP on education, and the World Bank finds its infrastructure spending to be inefficient and insufficient, both of which are deemed vital for long-term economic growth.

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Another factor limiting the effectiveness of U.S. assistance is negative perceptions of the U.S. and its aid programs inside Pakistan. According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of Pakistanis view the U.S. as an enemy. Nor have soaring U.S. aid levels had an impact on America's image; while Pakistani public opinion has fluctuated a bit over the years, it remains fairly steady with 65 percent of Pakistanis holding an unfavorable view of America. Meanwhile, a majority consistently say that U.S. assistance has either had a negative impact or no impact at all.

Moreover, conspiracy theories about nefarious purposes behind U.S. aid programs abound in Pakistan. To wit, it is the only country in the world witnessing a rise in polio infection rates due to the widely held belief that vaccinations are part of a western conspiracy to reduce Muslim populations.

For their part, Pakistani officials have chafed at the conditions attached to U.S. foreign aid. As a recent Congressional Research Service report notes, Pakistani leaders and citizens alike see U.S. aid as intent on interfering with Pakistani national security and foreign policy issues. Part of this has to do with legitimate concerns about how American stipulations might affect military effectiveness. But part is simply political pique. As former Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani once famously remarked, "Nobody should try to instruct Pakistan on how it should conduct the war on terror."

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Finally, Pakistan suffers from a number of structural problems that prevent the effective implementation of aid. These include the Pakistani government's weak planning capabilities, its lack of capacity to absorb and disperse the aid by nongovernmental organizations and the difficulty of finding local accounting firms to oversee monitoring and evaluation. Corruption is also rampant, with Pakistan ranking 126 out of 175 countries on Transparency International's highly regarded "corruption perceptions index." There is therefore good reason to believe that a great deal of the aid Pakistan receives from the U.S. never reaches its intended targets.

These factors have rendered U.S. aid to Pakistan ineffective and unproductive. With that in mind, a significant decrease in U.S. assistance may well compel Pakistan to reform its domestic institutions – and to engage more with international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

Ultimately, however, it is only the second-best reason to cut aid to Islamabad. The first is Pakistan's extensive and longstanding support to radical Islamist groups that have been responsible for the deaths of countless U.S., Afghan, Indian (and, ironically, Pakistani) lives.