US cuts aid to ‘terrorist state’ Pak :- 26.5.12 - TOI

Lawmakers Slam ‘Schizophrenic Ally’ For Jailing Osama Doc

Washington: A key US senate panel has voted to impose pointed and punitive cut in aid dollars to Pakistan for its continued support to stateengineered extremism, although the country, described bluntly by one lawmaker as a “terrorist state”, will still get at least $1 billion in American taxpayer money for 2013.
    Angered by a Pakistani court’s sentencing of a doctor, who helped the US nail Osama bin Laden, to 33 years in prison (for high treason), the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday voted for a symbolic but token $33 million cut in aid — a million for each year of the sentence. It came on top of the panel voting to withhold nearly a billion dollars in proposed aid subject to Pakistan re-opening Nato supply routes, although it still left more than $1 billion on the table. Further reductions have been threatened if Pakistan does not change course.
    The senate action reflected growing US anger over issues ranging from the Nato supply route stand-off to the sentencing of Shakil Afridi, all of which, some lawmakers suggest, show that Pakistan is in league with terrorists rather than with the US.
    “We need Pakistan, Pakistan needs us, but we don’t need Pakistan double-dealing and not seeing the justice in bringing Osama bin Laden to an end,” Lindsey Graham, a senate Republican who pushed for the additional cut in aid said, while calling Pakistan a “schizophrenic ally”.
    Following Afridi’s sentencing , California congressman Dana Rohrabacher said, “This is decisive proof Pakistan sees itself as being at war with us.”
    “There is no shared interest against Islamic terrorism,” Rohrabacher said, contesting the bromide periodically advanced by the administration that Islamabad is an ally in the war on terror. “Pakistan was and remains a terrorist state.”
    These and other remarks by US lawmakers suggest that many of them, including Rohrabacher, who supported Pakistan for more than two decades have turned against it.
    On Thursday, secretary of state Hillary Clinton waded into the issue, demanding that Afridi be released, because “his help was instrumental in taking down one of the world’s most notorious murderers that was clearly in Pakistan’s interest as well as ours and the rest of the world”. The Pakistani foreign office fired back, saying the US needed to respect Pakistan’s legal processes.