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Pakistan military used U.S. aid to arm itself against India, says expert

LONDON: A leading Pakistani security affairs analyst has disclosed that most of the money America gave to Pakistan to fight terrorism after the 9/11 attacks was used by the Pakistani Army to “arm” itself against India.

Ahmed Rashid, a trenchant critic of Pervez Musharraf and the Pakistani Army establishment, said between 2001 and 2007, the U.S. gave more than $10 billion to the Musharraf regime to finance its “war on terror.”

“Some 80 per cent of that money went to the Pakistani Army which instead of using it for the purposes it was meant used it to arm itself against India,” he said, speaking on the launch of his new book “Descent into Chaos: How the war against Islamic extremism is being lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.”

Mr. Rashid, who was once summoned by General Musharraf and told to stop criticising his regime, said the Pakistani Army was obsessed with India and the notion of national security was “based solely on defence against India.” And the continuing impasse on Kashmir gave it a “rationale” to persist with its anti-India obsession.

He lamented that there had been no progress on Kashmir and said the peace process launched by the then Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and President Musharraf at their summit in Islamabad in 2004 was just “limping.”

For all his intransigence, retired general Musharraf was keen to resolve the Kashmir issue, if only to shore up his own domestic position, and dropped a number of previous Pakistani demands. In 2006, he reportedly told his aides that he wanted a “major breakthrough” so that he could get elected President for the second time on the back of having “resolved” the Kashmir dispute.

“But the Indians have not moved on this. Nor is there any [international] pressure on India to move. This has given the rationale to the Pakistani military to say: we’ll support any anti-India force,” Mr. Rashid said, warning that so long as the Kashmir issue remained unresolved the ISI and the Army could continue to follow a policy of providing covert support to extremist groups working against India.

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