Poor #pakistan, having to help for only $22 billion

By JOEL BRINKLEY

Poor Pakistan.

The United States has bullied and abused the country for so long, forcing it to take $22 billion in aid, that it’s no wonder intelligence agents are showing up at the doors of people with pro-American biases, threatening to kill them.

After all, now that President Obama has laid out his strategy for Afghan withdrawal — while belligerently demanding Pakistan “keep its commitments” — some analysts say American forces can’t withdraw completely because the U.S. needs a base for cross border strikes into Pakistan. The killing of Osama bin Laden in May was the model.

Can’t Washington see the bin Laden raid destabilized the nation? Is it surprising the military arrested 30 people accused of helping the U.S. plan the assault?

“You want to know what happened and how, and who was involved,” explained Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s apologist, er, ambassador in Washington.

The U.S. didn’t tell Pakistan of the raid in advance for fear someone would tip off the target. Pakistanis were outraged. Then, twice in June, just after the U.S. gave the Pakistani army precise intelligence about militant bomb-making factories, the militants fled the facilities.

Pakistan noted U.S. intelligence said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, back in 2003. The information was probably bad.

The Pakistani army recently declared “it needs to be clarified that the army has never accepted any training assistance from the United States” except in a couple of small, inconsequential cases. True, the U.S. gives Pakistan more than $2 billion in military aid each year, but a mere $100 million goes toward training.

Pakistan’s relationship with America is now perfectly poisonous. Pakistan insists that’s our fault. “We can’t win the so-called American war on terror,” said Imran Khan, head of a Pakistani political party. “This is an unending war, and it will crush the backbone of the country.”

So why allow the U.S. to fire drone missiles into areas used by al-Qaida and others?

Sure, militants killed 32 Pakistanis in a June bombing, later blew up an elementary school and then sent man-and-wife suicide bombers to kill 10 policemen. That’s just a small sampling. Pakistani press reports note terrorists have killed 35,000 Pakistanis in recent years.

Pakistanis aver that’s retaliation for a U.S. presence. The army demands an end to drone attacks — and cut off U.S. food and water deliveries to the drone base.

Yet, the U.S. keeps sending in diplomats and intelligence officers, hoping to help the nation fight terror. Pakistan refuses to give them visas.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Islamabad, and said the Pakistanis promised “some very specific actions” in the near future to show their commitment to fighting terror. Well, Pakistan has certainly delivered.

On Monday, militants set ablaze three trucks carrying supplies to American troops in Afghanistan. No one was arrested.

Earlier, the intelligence service flatly denied that it assassinated journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad, an investigative reporter, just after he wrote an article showing Islamic militants had infiltrated the military. A short time later, they arrested a senior officer, Brigadier Ali Khan, and four others on charges of collaborating with an Islamic militant organization, Hizb ut-Tahrir. (The arrests came after the BBC reported Khan’s complicity.)

The New York Times quoted military head Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani complaining Pakistan had “mortgaged itself to the United States.

“We are helpless,” General Kayani lamented. “Can we fight America?”

It’s certainly comforting to know the government tried to expel that reporter, noting General Kayani “has not said a single word of what the New York Times has published.”

As American officials see it, Pakistan may be the world’s most perfidious nation. Surely you can see that they are misinformed.