Pervez Musharraf

U.S. Aid to Musharraf is Largely Untraceable Cash Transfers

Spencer Ackerman | November 7, 2007, 5:05PM

After Pervez Musharraf declared martial law this weekend, Condoleezza Rice vowed to review U.S. assistance to Pakistan, one of the largest foreign recipients of American aid. Musharraf, of course, has been a crucial American ally since the start of the Afghanistan war in 2001, and the U.S. has rewarded him ever since with over $10 billion in civilian and (mostly) military largesse. But, perhaps unsure whether Musharraf's days might in fact be numbered, Rice contended that the explosion of money to Islamabad over the past seven years was "not to Musharraf, but to a Pakistan you could argue was making significant strides on a number of fronts."

In fact, however, a considerable amount of the money the U.S. gives to Pakistan is administered not through U.S. agencies or joint U.S.-Pakistani programs. Instead, the U.S. gives Musharraf's government about $200 million annually and his military $100 million monthly in the form of direct cash transfers. Once that money leaves the U.S. Treasury, Musharraf can do with it whatever he wants. He needs only promise in a secret annual meeting that he'll use it to invest in the Pakistani people. And whatever happens as the result of Rice's review, few Pakistan watchers expect the cash transfers to end.

About $10.58 billion has gone to Pakistan since 9/11. That puts Pakistan in an elite category of U.S. foreign-aid recipients: only Israel, Egypt and Jordan get more or comparable U.S. funding. (That's only in the unclassified budget: the covert-operations budget surely includes millions more, according to knowledgeable observers.) While Israel and Egypt get more money, Pakistan and Jordan are the only countries that get U.S. cash from four major funding streams: development assistance, security assistance, "budget support" and Coalition Support Funds. Pakistan, however, gets most of its U.S. assistance from Coalition Support Funds and from budget support. And it's those two funding streams that have minimal accountability at best.

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Spencer Ackerman | November 5, 2007, 9:40AM

Everything you need to know about Pervez Musharraf's weekend declaration of martial law -- or, in his felicitous words, his placement of the Pakistani constitution in "abeyance"-- prominent journalist Ahmed Rashid tells you:

The other prime targets [of the declaration] were not the extremists terrorizing major swaths of northern Pakistan but the country's democratic, secular elite. Dozens of judges, lawyers and human rights workers have been arrested. Others have gone into hiding. Asma Jahangir, Pakistan's leading human rights activist, is under house arrest. She appealed yesterday for the Bush administration "to stop all support of the unstable dictator as his lust for power is bringing the country close to a worse form of civil strife."

So will the Bush administration listen to Jahangir, who's precisely the sort of person President Bush promised to support in his second inaugural? No, reports The New York Times.

Though Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Central Command chief Adm. William Fallon implored Musharraf not to declare martial law, Islamabad sees itself as having a free hand now that it's defied the administration. Says Musharraf's mouthpiece Tariq Azim Khan, "They would rather have a stable Pakistan — albeit with some restrictive norms — than have more democracy prone to fall in the hands of extremists. ... Given the choice, I know what our friends would choose."

Consider Rice's statement yesterday to a Fox News interviewer in Jerusalem:

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