Redam 'Kebencian thd Barat', Amerika akan Bantu $750 juta di Pakistan

Seorang gadis cantik di perbatasan Pakistan - Afghanistan yang dikenal sebagai daerah tak bertuan (Tribal areas), sedang bekerja di sebuah rumah sakit di wilayah itu. Daerah ini akan menjadi sasaran bantuan AS hingga US$ 750 juta sampai 5 tahun ke depan. Assumsi AS tentunya bahwa dengan kucuran uang sebesar itu, maka kemiskinan dan penderitaan di daerah itu akan terkurangi sehingga mereka tidak mudah di provokasi Taliban untuk memusuhi Barat.
Pola fikir AS & Barat selalu naif seperti itu dalam melihat setiap perlawanan kaum muslim di seluruh dunia. Mereka melupakan sebuah prinsip yang paling dasar yang menjadi akar perlawanan kepada mereka, yaitu diperkosanya keadilan ummat Islam. Selama AS bertindak semena-mena dan zolim kepada penduduk muslim di seluruh dunia (dengan mengangkangi kekayaan alamnya, politik-budayanya, dan menodai kehormatan mereka sebagai manusia beriman), maka selama itu pula perlawanan tak akan pernah pudar, dari Maroko hingga Indonesia. Islam dilahirkan di tanah Arab dulu juga karena punya misi itu, memberantas kezoliman dan tindakan manusia yang melampaui batas dalam perilakunya

U.S. plans $750 million in aid for Pakistani tribal areas

GHALANAI, Pakistan: The United States plans to pour $750 million in aid into Pakistan's tribal areas over the next five years as part of a "hearts and minds" campaign to win over the lawless region from Al Qaeda and Taliban militants.

But even before the plan has been fully carried out, documents and officials involved in the planning are warning of the dangers of distributing so much money in an area so hostile that oversight is impossible, even by Pakistan's own government, which faces rising threats from Islamic militants.

The question of who will be given the aid has quickly become one of the most contentious issues between local officials and American planners concerned that millions might fall into the wrong hands. The local political agents and tribal chiefs in this hinterland on the Afghan border have for years accommodated the very groups the American and Pakistani governments seek to drive out.

A closely scripted visit to the hospital in Ghalanai, Pakistan, which is being used for a pilot project by the United States Agency for International Development, showed the challenges on full display. The one-story hospital was virtually empty on a recent day.

Local people had no way to get there. Only 3 of the 110 beds were occupied. Two operating tables had not been used in months. Many doctors had left because the pay was too meager and security too precarious, said Dr. Yusuf Shah, the chief surgeon.

Sher Alam Mahsud, the local political boss who escorted a journalist on a rare visit, said he wanted all the American aid money "delivered to us." But the precarious security does not allow the Americans to assess the aid priorities firsthand or provide oversight for the first installment of $150 million that has been allocated by the administration of President George W. Bush.

"Delivering $150 million in aid to the tribal areas could very quickly make a few people rich and do almost nothing to provide opportunity and justice to the region," said Craig Cohen, the author of a recent study on U.S.-Pakistan relations at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Yet it is in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, as the region is formally called, or FATA, that Washington is intent on using the development aid as a counterinsurgency tool, according to a draft of the Agency for International Development plan given to The New York Times by an official who worked on it.

The draft warns that the "severe governance deficiencies" in the tribal areas will make it virtually impossible for the aid to be sustainable or to overcome the "area's chronic underdevelopment and consequent volatility." The ambitious plan was publicly highlighted during a visit to Pakistan last month by the Richard Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, as a measure of Washington's support for Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf.

Boucher explained the plan before a Congressional hearing on Wednesday. "Pakistan government is going to put $100 million a year for 10 years into the development of these areas," he said, "and we've told them we will come up with $150 million a year for the next five years to support the economic development of the tribal areas."

The aid money is in addition to billions of dollars in American military assistance that Pakistan has already received.

"The objective driving this decision is the hope that by bringing the FATA into the mainstream and assuring that basic human services and infrastructure are on par with the rest of Pakistan, the people of FATA would be less likely to welcome the presence of Al Qaeda and Taliban," the draft states.

The projects include health and education services, water and sanitation facilities and agricultural development, it says, making it clear that these were a means to a broader end. "The main goal of the United States government in relation to the FATA is counterterrorism," it says.

Even if the tribal areas were not under the sway of the Taliban, which they increasingly are, the development challenge would be steep enough, the document and interviews make clear.

The area, home to 3.2 million people, remains a desolate landscape where women are strictly veiled. Female literacy, at 3 percent, is among the lowest in the world. Schools are often used to run businesses. There is no banking system. Smuggling of opium and other contraband is routine.

The hostility to almost anything that smacks of foreign influence is such that the modest U.S. aid program, which is being administered by the charity Save the Children at the hospital here, was being delivered anonymously, undercutting any potential public relations benefit for the United States.

"We can't do branding," said Fayyaz Ali Khan, the program manager for Save the Children during an interview in the city of Peshawar, a Pakistani provincial capital outside the tribal areas. "Usually we say the aid comes from the American people but here we can't."

Suspicions about modern medicine are rife. A Pakistani doctor was blown up in his car in June after trying to counter the anti-vaccine propaganda of an imam in Bajaur, one of the tribal agencies, Pakistani officials said.

The Pakistani government has virtually no writ here. After years of fighting to assert its authority, at the cost of about 600 soldiers, it negotiated a series of peace accords with tribal authorities that have all but confined Pakistani Army troops to their barracks.

Tribal elders, local imams and political agents - a kind of governor whose title goes back to the British colonial days - are the on-the-ground arbiters of all decisions in many districts. The political agents are widely considered corrupt and arbitrary.

A senior U.S. official in Islamabad, who would not speak for attribution, defended the plan's goals as necessary and achievable. The official said that "Pakistani firms, consulting organizations and nongovernmental organizations," would be the main deliverers of the assistance.

Cohen said he was skeptical. Almost every potential recipient of the money was suspect in the eyes of the people it was supposed to help, he said. "The notion that there's going to be $150 million a year to Pakistani nongovernmental organizations who are going to be out in the open seems naïve to me," he said.

"The insecurity of the area will require a heavy reliance on local partners," like Pakistani nongovernmental organizations to administer projects, he added. "But the nongovernmental organizations don't trust the military, the military doesn't trust the tribal chiefs, and the trial chiefs won't trust us unless they're getting a cut of the money."

Such Pakistani groups were often targets of the Islamic militants in the tribal areas who are increasingly burning down CD shops and attacking small efforts to gain advantages for women.
Source: International Herald tribun