Clinton: $110M in Pakistan aid 'essential'
WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced a $110 million aid package for Pakistan on Tuesday that will support international efforts to relieve a humanitarian crisis in the Swat Valley that has left about 2 million people temporarily homeless.
"Providing this assistance is not only the right thing to do, but we believe that it is essential to global security," she said.
The U.S. military will deliver the aid, which was requested by Pakistan. It will include 30,000 family relief kits, 5,000 tents, water trucks and food. The aid money will also buy locally made products to boost Pakistani merchants.
Aid groups will also send text messages to refugees, many of whom have cellphones, to help them stay in touch and receive humanitarian aid.
Clinton also urged Americans to text "swat" to the number 20222 on their cellphones so they can donate $5. She said State Department employees have already donated that way.
The United States has given more than $3.2 billion to Pakistan since 2002. Clinton, however, said U.S. policy there has been "incoherent" since the Reagan administration backed Afghan insurgents fighting the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
She called President Obama's policy — aid combined with honest discussions about the need for Pakistan to battle Taliban insurgents— "different than anything that has been tried before."
The administration has been looking for ways to quickly marshal aid for the refugees in Swat, an area on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Members of the Taliban, the fundamentalist Muslim group that ran Afghanistan until their ouster by U.S. forces in 2001, have taken over much of the region.
"I think the administration has a tremendous opportunity staring it in the face," Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., told Richard Holbrooke, the administration's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, during a Senate hearing last week.
"With these tens of thousands of people being displaced as a consequence of Taliban excess, there is an opportunity actually to provide services, much as we did with the earthquake relief, which had a profound impact on the perception of America."
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