A Peaceful Pakistan in Sight?

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has announced aid projects worth $500m for Pakistan at the start of talks in Islamabad. The aid is the first major disbursement of a 2009 bill passed by the US Congress that allocates $1.5bn in nonmilitary aid once a year for five years.

Clinton's meetings with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and military chief General Ashfaq Kayani build on talks held in Washington in March and will be followed by an international conference in Kabul, the ninth of its kind in nine years. The conference is aimed at following up on Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s pledge to assume more control over Afghanistan before President Obama's July 2011 target date to begin withdrawing US forces.

Clinton’s announcement follows the signing of a groundbreaking Afghan-Pakistani trade agreement, which will allow Afghan goods bound for India to travel through Pakistan. Afghan Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal, who signed the deal with his counterpart in Islamabad on 18 July, said it was a signal that relations with Pakistan were improving.

The US considers a stable Pakistan vital to its interests, yet the country presents a wide range of concerns, including militant extremism, nuclear weapons proliferation and its tense relationship with India. The need for the Obama administration to reevaluate its strategy in Pakistan became apparent as early as May this year, following the attempted bombing of Time Square, suspected to have been carried out by Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad.

In close relation to this event, critics argue that the current administration has actually made the US less safe by increasing the size of the drone fleet being deployed over Pakistan to more than twice the size it was under the Bush administration. While claiming that only a handful of civilians have been killed in the missile attacks, US officials acknowledge that the number is in fact unknown.

Prior to Clinton’s arrival, protest groups issued a statement calling for an end to the Afghan war and for people who are involved in air strikes on Pakistani targets to be tried for war crimes. Only 17 percent of Pakistanis have a positive view of the US, according to a poll conducted last month by the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project.

Knowing that Pakistani hostility towards the US constitutes an imminent threat, Clinton asserted in an interview with the BBC that there “are still additional steps that we are asking and expecting the Pakistanis to take,” adding, “should an attack against the United States be traced to be Pakistani it would have a very devastating impact on our relationship.”

Nevertheless, an improved relationship must work both ways, and thus Clinton’s visit is also an attempt at demonstrating to the skeptical Pakistani public that the US is a trustworthy partner in the struggle against the Taliban.

Richard Holbrooke, US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, has also acknowledged that while interaction with the government is improving, public opinion remains largely unchanged. Hence, the aid will be targeted at improving the lives of the general public—an aspect of US-Pakistani relations that Clinton admits has been neglected—by improving basic services. As well as two dams, Clinton unveiled funding for drinking water, irrigation projects and health centers—a total of 26 projects.

Though millions of lives could be improved with these initiatives, this is not a given in a country which has been plagued by corruption for decades. The Guardian reported in February 2008 that as much as 70 percent of US aid since 2002 ($5.4bn) had been unaccounted for. This troublesome history, combined with the blatant paradox of carrying out strikes against a country by which the US has never been attacked while aiding a civilian population, which is sometimes made to pay for these strikes, complicates the task of evaluating Clinton’s initiative. While a more holistic approach to the region is certainly desirable, this is a minor, albeit potentially significant, step towards a more peaceful future for Pakistan.