Pakistan Largest Recipient Of U.S. Anti-Terror Funds: Report

Pakistan largest recipient of U.S. anti-terror funds: Report

http://www.dailyindia.com/show/14382...-funds:-Report

From our ANI Correspondent

Washington, May 24: A new study released by the Centre for Public Integrity, a non-profit organisation based in Washington, has said that Pakistan has been the largest recipient of anti-terror funds in the four years after 9/11.

According to the report, Pakistan received over three billion dollars from the Coalition Support Fund (CSF).

The report, quoted extensively by the Dawn, claims that at one point, Pakistan was billing the Bush Administration almost 200 million dollars per quarter for assistance in hunting down terrorists on the Afghan border.

"With the possible exception of Iraq reconstruction funds, I've never seen a larger blank check for any country than for the Pakistan CSF programme," Tim Rieser, a key adviser to Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy and the majority clerk on the Senate Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on foreign operations, told the surveyors.

"CSF is a backwater of lax oversight and poor accountability," he added.

The report claims that when Senator Jack Reed, another Democrat, returned from an October 2006 trip to Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, he noted that "the US Defence Representative Office [in Islamabad] recommends changing the Coalition Support Fund programme to paying for specific objectives that are planned and executed, rather than simply paying what the country bills."

The CSF programme was created in the series of emergency supplemental appropriations that Congress passed after the 9/11 attacks.

CSF reimburses approved governments for the cost of fuel, ammunition, security and airlift and the like for counterterrorism operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The report says that in some countries, human rights have suffered as authoritarian regimes are rewarded for their strategic and political importance. Often times, military aid was given with little oversight by Congress, it said.