The Senate Rebuilds Pakistan

By Michael Ruhl, University of New Mexico - Talk Radio News Service

Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.)
Photo by Michael Ruhl

In the next 5 years, the Pakistani infrastructure will be fortified by almost $10 billion American dollars, if Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) have anything to say about it. The aptly titled Kerry-Lugar Bill will provided money for rebuilding the lives of civilians in war torn Pakistan.

Both Kerry and Lugar said that most of the money that has been funneled into Pakistan in the past few years has gone towards security. The aim of this bill is to shift the balance, to place more of an emphasis on infrastructure.

The Senators want to use the money for building schools, improving health care, building bridges, water projects, and other elements of infrastructure. Kerry said that the target projects are “things that would improve life and give people a sense of progress” to civilians.

The money would also be used for ensuring an independent media, expanding human rights and the rule of law, expanding transparency in government, rooting out political corruption and countering the drug trade.

Additionally military funding would be conditioned upon several things, including Pakistani security forces preventing al Qaeda and Taliban forces from operating in Pakistan. The military forces would not be able to interfere in politics or in the judicial process, according to the provisions of the bill.

The legislation bill would give $1.5 billion each year from FY 2009-2013, and would recommend similar amounts of money over the subsequent five years. There would be required benchmarks to measuring how effective the funding is, and the President will have to submit semi-annual reports to Congress about progress made.

Afghanistan: Not playing by the rule of law

Dr. Adbul Jabbar Sabit, the Attorney General of Afghanistan spoke about the rule of law and its presence in Afghanistan. He said rule of law is a problem in Afghanistan and in the last 20 months he visited 18 provinces and made around 370 arrests. He said the arrests were mainly high-ranking officials, like deputy governors and chief financial officers of the provinces.

He said one of the main problems with the rule of law in Afghanistan is that the court system, which is completely independent, is full of corruption. As a result, he said, a fair percent of the perpetrators were acquitted and those that were convicted received much less severe sentences than their crimes called for.

He said that in a lot of provinces not all citizens are equal, for example, some of the governors are really warlords and perpetrate criminal action in their provinces. Sadit said that these warlord governors are too powerful for the government to restrain and therefore above the law.