United States fears Pak aid will feed graft

As the United States prepares to triple its aid package to Pakistan to a proposed $1.5 billion over the next year Obama administration officials are debating how much of the assistance should go directly to a government that has been widely accused of corruption, American and Pakistani officials say. A procession of Obama administration economic experts have visited Islamabad, the capital, in recent weeks to try to ensure both that the money will not be wasted by the government and that it will be more effective in winning the good will of a public increasingly hostile to the United States, according to officials involved with the project. As American lawmakers move toward passage of the aid legislation, the administration knows it must get quick results from the increased assistance or face potential Congressional cutbacks down the road in a program envisioned to cost $1.5 billion every year for the next five years. “We’re struggling over how much cash to give to the government,” said a senior American official involved in the planning, who declined to be named according to diplomatic custom. The overhaul of American assistance, led by the State Department, comes amid increased urgency about an economic crisis that is intensifying social unrest in Pakistan, and about the willingness of the government there to sustain its fight against a raging insurgency in the northwest. It follows an assessment within the Obama administration that the amount of nonmilitary aid to the country in the past few years was inadequate and favored American contractors rather than Pakistani recipients, according to several of the American officials involved. American officials say the main goals of the new assistance will be to shore up the crumbling Pakistani state by building infrastructure like roads and power plants, and to improve the standing of the United States with the Pakistani people. In return, the Obama administration expects Pakistan to keep up the fight against Islamic militants, though there are worries that the effort will turn out to be a short-term spurt overtaken by Pakistan’s preoccupation with its archrival, India. President Asif Ali ZardariAsif Ali Zardari has insisted that Pakistan cannot afford to continue its fight against terrorism without substantial American help, a number that he has sometimes put in the tens of billions of dollars. Mr. Zardari is scheduled to meet President Obama in New York this week, and assistance is expected to be a major topic. American officials said the need to assist the Pakistani economy directly became alarmingly clear when recent power shortages across the country contributed to Pakistan’s first year of negative industrial growth. There were widespread complaints here, including by Finance Minister Shaukat Tarin, that the government had solutions to improve the power output but was refusing to implement them in order to benefit a handful of power plant operators. Another impetus came last week when 19 women were killed in a stampede for free flour in Karachi, even though Pakistan had a bumper wheat crop this year. After a recent visit to Islamabad, the deputy secretary for management and resources at the State Department, Jacob J. Lew, expressed anxiety about how to ensure that the aid money was spent properly, saying he was concerned that “the money needed to go to the purposes for which it was intended.” “We had to choose a method of funding that was most likely to produce results efficiently and effectively,” he said Sept. 11 at a briefing at the State Department. Mr. Lew’s suggestions of inappropriate spending by the Pakistanis caused such a furor among government officials that the American ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, issued an unusual public statement on Wednesday intended to reassure the Pakistanis that the United States was “not depriving the Pakistani government any degree of direct funding as a result of lack of confidence or trust.” Part of the Obama administration’s approach is to expand nonmilitary aid to Pakistan, after years in which almost all American assistance to the country was intended to help the military fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But some American officials said the Pakistani Army was diverting the money toward programs aimed at deterring India instead. A searing report by the Government Accountability Office last year said the Bush administration had relied too heavily on the Pakistani military to achieve its counterterrorism goals, and had paid too little attention to economic assistance. Money intended to help civilians during the Bush years was generally delivered by American contractors who administered programs like training provincial government officials