Washington has given the Frontier Corps $43.8 million (£30 million) of equipment: Anne Patterson, the US Ambassador, handed over $1.5 million of it in January, including helmets and bullet-proof vests. Armoured vehicles will follow in a few months, the embassy said. US officials say that Washington is ready to spend up to $400 million on upgrading the corps, and building it a new training base outside Peshawar over the next few years.
They are full of praise for Major-General Tariq Khan, previously the Pakistani Army's representative at US Central Command in Florida, who took over the Frontier Corps in September. They also highlight the success of its new 500-man commando unit, credited with killing or capturing more than 60 militants since September.
In the meantime, however, the corps remains heavily reliant on the Pakistani Army, which provides all its officers and air support. “It'll be a long time before the FC can operate independently,” said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a Pakistani military analyst.
Since independence Pakistan has had to depend on foreign assistance in its development efforts and to balance its international debt payments. In 1960 the World Bank organized the Aid-to-Pakistan Consortium to facilitate coordination among the major providers of international assistance. The consortium held 92 percent of Pakistan's outstanding disbursed debt at the end of June 1991. The consortium's members include the United States, Canada, Japan, Britain, Germany, France, and international organizations such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). The World Bank accounted for 26 percent of the outstanding debt, and the ADB, which was the largest lender in the early 1990s, accounted for 15 percent. Most nonconsortium funding comes from Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing Middle Eastern countries. Most aid is in the form of loans, although the proportion of grants increased from around 12 percent in the late 1970s to around 25 percent in the 1980s, mainly because of food aid and other funds directed toward Afghan refugees. With the decline in this aid after 1988, the proportion of grants decreased to 16 percent in FY 1992.
The white paper detailing the new U.S. strategy on Pakistan and Afghanistan calls for increasing and broadening development and economic assistance to Pakistan. It echoes recent recommendations by both U.S. and Pakistani policymakers who have argued against too much emphasis on military assistance, the Bush administration's focus. Nonmilitary aid is now seen as an important tool in achieving the core U.S. objective in the region--eliminating terrorist safe havens in Pakistan and preventing them from returning. President Barack Obama called upon Congress to pass pending bills that would authorize $7.5 billion in nonmilitary aid to Pakistan for the next five years and create "reconstruction opportunity zones" to enhance regional trade and foreign investment. But security threats to U.S. personnel, lack of oversight, a weak Pakistani leadership, and mistrust between Islamabad and Washington continue to pose serious hurdles.
Of the total $12.3 billion in U.S. aid to Pakistan since 2002, less than 27 percent went toward development and economic assistance. Meanwhile, growing extremist violence and lack of access to insurgent areas has severely constrained international aid officials as well as their Pakistani counterparts. Anger over suspected U.S. unmanned drone attacks has led militants to kill and abduct (CSMonitor) foreign aid officials in Pakistan's northwest and Balochistan Province. Experts also say the United States lacks the institutional capacity to implement sophisticated, targeted development programs in Pakistan. CFR's Daniel Markey writes any increased levels of assistance programming will require significant expansion of USAID, the U.S. foreign aid agency, and the U.S. State Department