U.S. & Japan leading donors to Pakistan

Despite the role of Pakistan’s ISI spy service in funding the Taliban, and despite Pakistan serving as host for Osama bin Laden while he was in hiding, the U.S. continues to lead the world in donating development aid to Pakistan.

The Congressional Research Service offers this chart in a recent report:

The argument for aid is that strengthens Pakistani institutions and stability which helps decrease the risks that Pakistan would turn into a fundamentalist Islamic state.  But in many ways, Pakistanis already live under sharia law, and the government sponsors jihadists anyway.

Moreover, as author Douglas Wissing has pointed out, mismanaged development aid projects can actually increase instability.  Given what we know about Pakistan’s corruption and consistent mismanagement of public projects and funds, are we actually foolish enough to believe that development aid to Pakistan is being managed well?

If as much scrutiny were applied to aid in Pakistan as has been applied to money spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, I am confident that we would find a string of abuses where aid ends up being contracted out by Pakistani officials to their own relatives, to Islamic militants, or is just outright stolen.

Aid to Afghanistan reduces security

According to Douglas Wissing, author of the new book Funding the Enemy: How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll The Taliban, there has been no research or evidence to substantiate the claim that foreign aid or nation building increase security or stability overseas.  Poorly managed foreign aid, he says, can actually increase insecurity.  Take a listen to a one-minute clip from Mr. Wissing when he was interviewed earlier this month on The Gary Null Show:

Libya spends $1.4b on Islamist rebels & waste

Remember the $135 million in U.S. financial aid promised to Libyan rebels and their newly forming Islamist government?  Or perhaps you’ll remember the €70 million ($90 million USD) from the European Commission humanitarian aid department (ECHO), €20 million from Sweden, over $15 million from the U.K. in aircraft and ships, and other EU member aid for a sum of $195 million in total European aid to Libya?  Well, you can kiss it all good-bye.  It has vanished.

The Libyan National Transitional Council, which has received and doled out much of the international aid to the Islamist rebels who fought Qaddafi, has bled over a billion dollars in recent months.  The NTC has squandered so much money that it will suspend its welfare for Muslim militiamen.  Corruption in the third world is one thing, but handing out over a billion dollars—much of it in foreign aid from developed countries dealing with their own debt crises—to heavily armed Islamic fighters is an insane abomination.

From RT on Apr. 14:

Libya freezes rewards for ex-rebels over mass fraud

Libya’s National Transitional Council has suspended a multi-million-dollar payout program to former anti-Gaddafi rebels after admitting it was steeped in fraud. Officials cited duplicate payouts, and claims from impostors and even the dead.

­Since last year’s overthrow of longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi, the National Transition Council, Libya’s temporary replacement government, has promised to reward ordinary citizens who joined the rebellion.

The program began three months ago, with former rebels being given a one-time payment of up to $3,200 – a sizable sum for Libya. NTC has already paid out $1.4 billion.

Now, the handouts have stopped.

“Millions of dinars allocated to revolutionaries were lost in illegitimate payments to non-beneficiaries,” announced NTC spokesman Mohammed Harizi.

Paying people money based on nothing but unverifiable information that they fought in the civil war always appeared an idea ripe for abuse. Since the war was fought largely by ragtag groups of militiamen, many units did not even write down the names of those who joined them, much less outline their exact role in the conflict.

The NTC delegated the job of making reward lists to the tribal councils who recruited the militias in the first place.

Whether through lack of information or integrity, the lists have been a disaster. The NTC claims that some legitimate claimants were not selected, other names were listed more than once, and some names belong to people who hadn’t shot a bullet in the conflict.

“The corruption is too much,” said Harizi. “Some of the people on the lists aren’t even alive.”

This follows the fiasco of a similar program that provided treatment abroad for the war wounded. Instead of those who suffered real injuries, many entirely healthy Libyans with good connections to the tribal leaders who decided the lists got sponsored trips abroad. The program has also now been curtailed.

Following the announcement, some former rebel fighters who missed out on their payouts staged a protest outside the NTC headquarters in Tripoli, reportedly shooting at the building.

The NTC has promised to restructure the reward program in the coming months, but it is unclear how they will obtain more reliable information for future lists.

Jizya resurfaces in yet another country

Lately it’s been Egypt.  Prior to that it was Cyprus.  Before that it was Pakistan, Iraq, the Philippines, and Yemen.

Now it may be Syria, where the discriminatory jizya tax is reportedly being imposed on Christians in Homs by the “Free” Syrian Army.  Qatar and Saudi Arabia have armed jihadist rebels against the Assad regime, and the West has helped fund them.

Remember this story from February?  The U.K. is giving £2 million to help FSA rebels who appear to be simultaneously profiting from the Christians under their boots.

David Cameron announces £2m fund to help Syrian civilians

The UK will provide funding for medical supplies and food for 20,000 people affected by fighting in the Syrian city of Homs, David Cameron has said.

The prime minister said the situation in Syria was “appalling” and described what was happening as “butchery”.

Speaking alongside French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Mr Cameron said the international community could do more to “get rid of this brutal dictator”.

Syrian government troops are trying to dislodge rebels rebels from Homs.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s authorities have responded to anti-government protests – which they blame on “extremists and terrorists” – with overwhelming military force since they began in March 2011.

As Mr Cameron spoke, Syrian troops resumed heavy shelling of the city, activists say, a day after the UN General Assembly called for an end to violence.

Parts of Homs have been battered by mortars and rockets fired by Syrian government troops for nearly two weeks, as they try to dislodge hundreds of rebels from the Free Syrian Army.

The BBC’s Jim Muir, in neighbouring Lebanon, says the passing of the resolution at the UN General Assembly clearly is not affecting events on the ground, but it gave all parties a chance to air their views.

The motion, which was voted for by 137 member states, called on the Syrian authorities “to stop all violence or reprisals immediately, in accordance with the League of Arab States initiative”.

Russia and China were among the 12 states who voted against the non-binding resolution. There were also 17 abstentions.

On Friday, France and the UK urged the Syrian opposition to unite and said it needed more international support to resist suppression.

Um, you mean to at least not engage in suppression themselves?

“We cannot bring about a Syrian revolution… if the Syrian revolution does not make an effort to rally together and organise so that we can better help them,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy told reporters after the bilateral talks.

Mr Cameron said: “We need to take all the action we can to put the maximum pressure on Assad to go, and to stop the butchery that is taking place…

Butchery and highway robbery that appears to be a two-way street.  That’s your tax euros at work.

“Near East” dominates U.S. foreign aid budget

The Congressional Research Service published a report on Jan. 6 with a title dreadful enough to guarantee that nobody will read its contents.  Buried within “State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs: FY2012 Budget and Appropriations” was this chart on U.S. foreign aid distribution by region:

Note that the smallest amounts of foreign aid go to Christian Europe, Buddhist East Asia, and Catholic Latin America.  The largest amounts go to Africa and South and Central Asia (88 percent of which is for Afghanistan and Pakistan only), and the region that will get the most in FY2012 is the “Near East,” which is mostly Islamic.

Israel will get a share of the Near East aid, but Muslim countries will get major chunks of outlays for Africa and Asia.

The FY2012 budget would provide aid of a billion dollars or more to five countries.  One is Israel; the other four are Islamic.

We’re not just funding “both sides of a conflict.”  We’re giving money to those who are hostile to America in a time we can least afford it.

 

2011: Folly of funding the Arab Spring

The year 2011 will be remembered for the Arab Spring, and it will only look worse as the fog clears.  We saw the power vacuum created by the ouster of Arab leaders.  Now we see the filling of the vacuum by Islamist elements bent on imposing sharia law, subjugating their non-Muslim minority populations, and putting peace agreements with Israel into a paper shredder.  What’s worse—we bankrolled it.

Whether it was Pres. Obama’s insistence on a massive G8 stimulus package for the Islamic world or Hillary Clinton’s halal food distribution to the Libyan rebels, 2011 is one for the record books in terms of funding the very same menacing global force that we’ve been fighting since 9/11.

Here are 2011′s low points of squandered, taxpayer-originated Western aid money to a region falling under the shadow of the Muslim Brotherhood:

• $135 million in U.S. financial aid to Libyan rebels and their newly forming Islamist government
• €70 million ($90 million USD) from the European Commission humanitarian aid department (ECHO), €20 million from Sweden, over $15 million from the U.K. in aircraft and ships, and other EU member aid for a sum of $195 million in total European aid to Libya
• Most notably, $20 billion in aid and loans for Egypt and Tunisia from the taxpayers of the G8 economies
• France provided at least “40 tonnes of weapons” to Libyan rebels
• For Tunisia, U.S. aid to the tune of $2 million in “Transitional Initiative” funds; and an additional $5 million to support “civil society” groups to peddle their influence with the new Islamist government
• Federal grants to facilitate remittance programs to Tunisia and Libya
• Pentagon officials announced in November that U.S. arms deals with Egypt will continue even though Egypt will most likely not honor its peace treaty with Israel

Supporters of the funding will say that this is helping to promote “reform” in the Arab world.

But recall that the Taliban itself was originally seen in the 1990s by several observers as a “reform movement” that would purge Afghanistan of its violent history of rival warlords that competed along ethnic, tribal, and regional lines.  There are many to this day (including State Department employees in private) who say we shouldn’t be worried about the Taliban because they’re more concerned with controlling Afghanistan than they are in exporting terrorism.

But the simple fact of 9/11, which the Taliban enabled by playing handmaiden to Al Qaeda, disproved the delusional concept that Islamist government presents no risk to the West.

We paid for the new Islamist regimes, and it’s time we demand a refund.

Foreign aid to Palestinian territories closely correlated with number of terror deaths

While the mainstream media attack Republicans in Congress for holding aid money to the Palestinian Authority, and while Republican presidential candidates are lampooned for suggesting scaled back foreign aid, we would do well to remember the startling trend exposed several years ago by the Terror Finance Blog, Daniel Pipes, Jean-Paul Azam, Alexandra Delacroix, and CAMERA, that the number of individual deaths caused by Palestinian Arab terrorism track uncannily with the amount of money that they receive in millions of dollars in international aid:

Aid to the Palestinian territories, although nominally restricted to the Palestinian Authority, is routinely passed through to the Hamas-controlled Gaza government by Mahmoud Abbas (code name:  Abu Mazen).  The Gaza government employs “security forces” who moonlight as Hamas operatives.  Checks are written to the families of “martyrs.”  The Palestinian Authority gives stipends to convicted terrorists in Israeli jails and paydays for released terrorists after prisoner swaps.

Is it any wonder then that when the Palestinian Authority is flush with funds, the Holy Land is flush with fatalities?

Somali govt budget less than al-Shabaab’s

In September, Somalia’s prime minister Abdiweli Ali told NPR’s Morning Edition’s incredulous interviewer David Greene that despite a billion dollars in international aid, Somalia’s government has an operating budget of only $1.5 million per month.  Take a listen to a somewhat feisty (by NPR standards) two minute exchange:

That is only $18 million per year.  (The rest has vanished through corruption and who knows what else.)  Meanwhile, jihadist group al-Shabaab has an annual operating budget between $70 to $100 million per year.  How can the government compete with al-Shabaab in terms of providing public services and maintaining the loyalty of the population?

Fix for contract scandal: stop nation building

A guest on the Fox News Channel has offered a possible solution to the Afghanistan war contracting process that has helped line the pockets of the Taliban.  Kerry Patton of the National Security Leadership Foundation says the U.S. should cease foreign aid to Pakistan and stop nation building in Afghanistan.  The other members of a Fox News panel dismissed the solution as “a bit dramatic.”

A recent U.S. investigation found that the Taliban has received $360 million in U.S. funds since the invasion of Afghanistan.

Brits give £5 million to suicide bombers

More than 5 percent of British aid to the Palestinian Authority goes to the “martyrs”…  More evidence of the folly of aid to the Palestinian territories and how it’s misused.

From Jihad Watch on Aug. 9:

£5 million of British aid money to Palestinian Authority has gone to suicide bombers’ families

Just what Britons didn’t need to hear in a global fiscal crisis, as the PA pulls in a total of £86 million in British aid each year. Will the government continue to pay with “willing submission” (Qur’an 9:29)?

“Families of suicide bombers given £5m in British aid cash,” by Matthew Kalman for the Daily Mail, August 8 (thanks to Peter):

British aid cash is being given to the families of suicide bombers, it was claimed last night.

The Palestinian Authority, which gets £86million of British aid a year, has authorised payments of almost £5million to the families of ‘martyrs’.

Another £3million has been given to 5,500 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails. The payments, using taxpayers’ cash donated from Britain and the European Union, have been described as ‘ludicrous’ by one Tory MP.

‘Every terrorist in prison, including those whose acts led to the deaths of Israeli civilians, are on the PA payroll,’ said Itamar Marcus, of Palestinian Media Watch.

‘The salary goes directly to the terrorist or the terrorist’s family, and prisoners receive their salaries from the day of arrest.’

Tory MP Philip Davies said the payments were ‘ludicrous’. He added: ‘People think overseas aid is to try to alleviate terrible poverty in places where they can’t afford to look after themselves. But it’s being put to these kind of purposes.

‘It would be bad enough at the best of times, but at a time when we have got no money, it is utterly inexcusable.’

Last month, Britain committed to giving £86million a year in aid to the Palestinian Authority until 2015.

The payments to families and prisoners are on a sliding scale, from £250 a month for prisoners sentenced to less than three years, to a maximum of £2,140 a month for anyone serving more than 30 years.

The payments compare with salaries of £515 for a regular Palestinian civil servant and £480 for officers in the Palestinian security forces.

This is the entity that wants the U.N. to hand them a state, which they will then be incapable of governing.

Minister of State Alan Duncan said in February: ‘We are very careful how we spend our money in the occupied Palestinian territories. We would abhor any money falling into the hands of extremists.’

The Government is under pressure for the amount of aid it is handing out at a time of austerity. It plans to increase foreign aid payments by 35 per cent to £11.4billion by 2015.

This comes despite several scandals involving aid. Last week, it was revealed that money to Ethiopia was being used as a political tool and those who oppose the government do not receive handouts.

David Cameron has admitted that the controversial pledge to spend billions more on international aid was a ‘difficult commitment’ at a time when spending programmes were being slashed at home.

The Prime Minister admitted that some aid had been ‘wasted’, but continued to dismiss ‘aid sceptics’.

Abbas stole $1.3 billion, says Dahlan

Mahmoud Abbas (code name: Abu Mazen) stole $1.3 billion from Yasser Arafat’s old rainy day fund of looted tax money according to a political opponent, Muhammad Dahlan.  The once $2 billion Palestinian Investment Fund (PIF) slush fund has long been under a well-deserved cloud of suspicion for corruption, cronyism, and nepotism.  (See here and here.)  This only reinforces our understanding of the horrible corruption and fathomless accounting of the Palestinian Authority.

(And yes, Hillary Clinton still wants unfettered access to U.S. tax dollars to continue transfers to the entities like the Palestinian Authority.)

From the Jerusalem Post:

Abbas ‘feels he’s above the law,’ charges Dahlan
By KHALED ABU TOAMEH
07/31/2011

Ousted Fatah official Muhammad Dahlan over the weekend launched a scathing attack on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, accusing him of dictatorship and financial corruption.

He said that more than $1 billion have gone missing from a fund that was handed over to Abbas after he was elected president in 2005.

Dahlan’s attack on Abbas came after PA security forces raided the former Fatah commander’s home in Ramallah on Thursday, arresting his bodyguards and confiscating weapons and armored vehicles.

Dahlan was at home during the raid, which was carried out by dozens of security officers, but was not detained thanks to his parliamentary immunity.

Shortly thereafter, Dahlan left for Jordan through the Allenby Bridge, where he gave a series of interviews to Arab media outlets in which he strongly condemned Abbas, 76, and accused him of financial corruption and seeking to destroy Fatah.

“Abbas does not recognize any law, morals or values,” Dahlan said, referring to the raid on his home and last month’s decision to expel him from the Fatah Central Committee.

“Abbas feels that he’s above the law.”

Dahlan said that the dispute between Fatah and Hamas, and Israel’s presence in the West Bank, gave Abbas a “free hand to practice dictatorship against the Palestinian people, silence people and deny them their salaries.”

Dahlan said that the dispute with the PA president erupted after he demanded to know what had happened to $1.3b. that was in the account of the Palestinian Investment Fund.

The PIF was established in 2000 as an independent Palestinian investment company “committed to maximizing the assets’ value for its shareholder: the Palestinian people.”

According to its website, PIF’s chief objective is “to safeguard and consolidate the Palestinian people’s investments and property, both in Palestine and abroad.”

Dahlan said that after the death of Yasser Arafat, the responsibility for the fund was transferred to Abbas in 2005.

“This is money that Yasser Arafat had collected from Palestinian taxpayers for the day that we would need it,” Dahlan explained. “There aren’t more black days than today, where our employees are not receiving salaries. Why doesn’t he pay from this fund, which he controls personally? The PLO does not know about this sum.

This is documented money that was delivered to him [Abbas] from an international accounting company.”

Dahlan said that when he exposed the issue of the PIF last April, Abbas got furious. “He thinks that the sun can be covered with a sieve,” he added.

“Yasser Arafat worked strenuously to save this money for the ‘black day.’ Mahmoud Abbas thinks that the people don’t know where this money is and who received it. Now he’s admitting that there is only $700 million in the fund.

But the real sum should be about $2b.”