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."
"If we did that and did it well, it could change the game for the government," Kerry added.
"I could not agree more," Holbrooke replied. "We are looking for how to — how to act on that, and we will."
The Obama administration also is backing a plan to send more humanitarian aid to Pakistan that is meeting some resistance in Congress. The bill, backed by Kerry and Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., would triple non-military aid to $1.5 billion annually for the next five years.
In 2005, after an earthquake devastated much of Pakistan's Kashmir region, the U.S. spent almost $1 billion on relief efforts and "reaped a greater reward in popular support than any amount of public diplomacy could generate," Kerry and Lugar said in a prepared statement.
"For a brief period, America was challenging the terrorists in a true battle of hearts and minds — and winning," the statement said.
During the same hearing, Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., told Holbrooke the administration had not combined humanitarian and military resources into a comprehensive plan to help Pakistan fight the Taliban. Menendez cited a Government Accountability Office report that faulted the Bush administration for lacking such a plan even as it sent Pakistan $12 billion in military aid since 2002, with little to show for it.
"You're asking us to vote for a whole new set of money without knowing whether there are going to be benchmarks" or whether we will have a better system of accountability, said Menendez, who chairs the subcommittee in charge of foreign assistance.