The visiting American official couldn't have been more blunt. After attending Monday's Friends of Pakistan meeting in Islamabad, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher told a news conference, ‘It is not going to be a cash advance for Pakistan’. Similar sentiment is said to be filtering in from Saudi Arabia and China at a time when Pakistan needs at least $4bn to avert a balance-of-payments crisis. The Saudi oil facility, which we had taken for granted, is not going to be available, at least not in the near future and most certainly not in the way we want ‚ for us "deferred payment' means a write-off. The visit to China by President Asif Ali Zardari last week may have fetched two nuclear reactors but not the kind of cash handout he probably expected. That should not serve to dilute the results of the Beijing talks.
One should, however, show some understanding of the Friends' position, for they themselves are grappling with the most severe financial crisis the world has seen since the Great Depression. All of them are still willing to help Pakistan but they would not, to quote Boucher again, 'throw money on the table’. This may sound negative, perhaps even discourteous, but factors other than the purely economic may also be contributing to the Friends' reluctance to give cash to Pakistan.
There is no doubt the political crisis beginning with Pervez Musharraf's dismissal of the chief justice in March 2007 and ending 17 months later with the general's resignation last August did enormous damage to Pakistan's image and exposed its political weaknesses, especially the cleavage between the military and the political leadership at a time when a full-scale insurgency was raging. The general election, the assumption of power by the democratic government and the constitutional change in the occupancy of the President House have served to partially undo the damage. But it will take some time before the world will view Pakistan with a degree of equanimity.
The donors, to wit, want to satisfy themselves with Pakistan's own programme for meeting the economic challenge and mobilising national resources to enable the country to stand on its own feet. Their concerns about aid use are not baseless, for the lending agencies and governments have often found foreign assistance falling victim to mismanagement and reckless spending. Foreign aid no doubt helps, but more important is our ability to plan methodically, carry out structural reforms, set the right socio-economic priorities and develop a leadership in which the nation and the world have confidence.
