Donors’ concern over Pak’s ‘double game’ of redirecting terror funds against India

LONDON - With Pakistan demanding from the international community more funds for its anti-terror efforts, the world, particularly the US, has voiced concerns over the possibility of Islamabad redirecting it towards building defences against arch-rival India, rather than against the terrorists.

While the Pakistan government has continuously pressed the Obama administration to provide more aid and hasten the release of war arrears, it has so far failed to disclose how it accounted for some 1.3billion dollars received over the past year in Coalition Support Funds (CSF) by the US for fighting “terrorism.”

Washington has provided billions of dollars to Islamabad asking it to reign in the extremist groups operating from the terror hot bed tribal areas, however, the later has now started to threaten the Obama administration to release more funds failing which it would be forced to rethink its priorities.

“The time that we have to rethink our security priorities about external threats is approaching. We will stop operations (in FATA) and go back to the eastern borders,” retired Lieutenant General Syed Akthar Ali told parliament recently.

Ali admitted that in the past six months the US had released 1.3billion dollars under the Coalition Support Fund (CSF) arrears, but claimed that it was still holding back payments of about a billion dollars.

Even Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told President Obama’s Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke that the US must start delivering what it had pledged to Pakistan ‘before the time runs out.’

“Time is running out fast, public support can only be kept intact if the international community start delivering on their pledges,” a blunt Gilani told Holbrooke during the later’s visit to Islamabad last week.

The international community is apprehensive about Pakistan’s intentions and there is a growing tiredness amongst Western donors that it has cried wolf once too often, The BBC reports.

“There is grand disillusionment amongst the Europeans for Pakistan’s refusal to address our concerns - transparency about aid funds, improving governance, using aid money to build up defences against India rather than fighting terrorism and its lack of concern for minorities,” a senior European diplomat said.

At a conference in Tokyo last year, “Friends of Pakistan” had pledged five billion dollars in aid, but so far few pledges have been honoured except by the US.

The remaining funds have been denied on one pretext or another, which certainly highlights the fears of the international community. (ANI)