The Trump budget

Pakistan is the recipient of a diversity of supporting aid from a range of nations, much of it targeted towards health, education and crucial infrastructure. Many of the projects that are funded thus are at the grass roots and never make the headlines. Some of them are funded by the Americans, and in line with the promises he made on the campaign trail President Trump has used his first budget to cut a range of financial supports both at home and abroad. The US has recently made a payment under the Coalition Support Fund of $550 million, a payment that there had been concern about and some resistance to the making thereof. Whether future payments under the CSF will be made remains something of an open question. What is not in doubt is the cut to the State Departments’ foreign aid programme by a swinging 28%. All of the US many aid recipients are going to feel the pinch. Afghanistan currently receives $4.7 billion — against $742 million for Pakistan. Whether the cuts will be spread evenly across the board remains to be seen, but this feeds into a range of questions that are being asked not only in the US but elsewhere about the value-for-money of aid granted to Pakistan. Any cuts in aid to states that are contiguous to Pakistan, and specifically Afghanistan are going to have a cross-border impact. The structural weaknesses of Afghanistan are tending to widen too. Reductions in the aid budget to Iraq which currently gets $1.1 billion could see an impact on non-military programmes working on rolling back the IS, and the Law of Unforeseen Consequences comes into play.

Other monies coming — or perhaps not — from America include the $900 million set aside for Pakistan from the defence appropriation bill for 2017. The reimbursement may not be carried over from 2016 and this cannot be taken as a done deal. Pakistan is seen as ‘critical to defeating insurgency’ and has support among elements of the American military, but the aid environment is shifting, old certainties are less so. We expect to hear the ‘do more’ mantra once again. 


Published in The Express Tribune, March 18^th, 2017.