Marines and Spies

Pakistanis are wary of American infiltration

On Thursday, President Obama signed the Kerry-Lugar bill controlling American financial aid to Pakistan over the coming five years into law. For both the U.S. and Pakistani governments, the matter has thus been satisfactorily concluded and is now off the table. Still, anger among members of the Pakistani parliament, military forces and the public in general rages on.

The Kerry-Lugar bill proposes a total of $7.5 billion in aid for projects such as schools, universities and hospitals over the next five years. The bill also stipulates that Pakistan will receive no support for “security measures” unless the U.S. State Department can affirm that Pakistan is satisfactorily meeting a series of preset conditions. Among them is the expansion of military action against local insurgents nationwide, especially in the provinces of Baluchistan and Punjab, as well as the government’s adherence to measures designed to ensure, in the opinion of many Pakistanis, that their nuclear arsenal will be controlled by the United States.

But the financial assistance provisions of the bill, supposedly with no strings attached, have also provoked mistrust and anger among many Pakistanis. Funds are to bypass agencies of the Islamic Republic and be directly distributed to various “developmental projects” by the U.S. embassy in Islamabad. In order to accomplish this and to better control how funds are used, the embassy intends to add an additional 300 to 400 new employees. The Pakistanis suspect that the United States will just use this as a pretext for putting more intelligence agents who will enjoy diplomatic immunity and other special rights into place.

The increase in personnel, supposedly there to oversee the administration of financial aid, will require a massive expansion of the embassy and its surroundings. Construction costs are projected to be $736 million, almost exactly the bill for the new heavily fortified super-embassy in Iraq.

At the same time, the American government wants to expand its consulate in Peshawar and has already purchased the five-star Pearl Continental hotel for that purpose. Peshawar is the capital city of the Northwest Frontier Province, the center of the civil war zone. Many Pakistanis fear that the United States really wants to set up a CIA headquarters there.

The construction of the new embassy will be accompanied by an increase in U.S. “security measures.” Rumors are making the rounds in Pakistan that 1,000 additional U.S. Marines as well as numerous intelligence operatives will be stationed in Islamabad. U.S. officials deny these rumors and claim that Pakistani personnel will provide security for the embassy. The truth is, the U.S. DynCorp company, in tandem with the Pakistani company Inter-Risk, already has a contract for these services. Inter-Risk has recently been the target of several Pakistani police raids in which large quantities of illegally smuggled heavy weapons were confiscated. According to the police, the weapons were more suited to military “special operations” than they were to guard duty.