The Obama administration may triple development aid to Pakistan while also boosting military assistance to secure more help in fighting the insurgency in Afghanistan, a US official said on Friday. The official, who spoke on condition that he not be named because President Barack Obama has yet to unveil his fresh strategy on Afghanistan, said non-military assistance could rise to three times the current roughly $450 million a year. Military aid, now running at $300 million a year, could also rise, although by a lesser amount, the official added, saying that conditions could be attached to the defense funds but not to the development money. The steps aim to win greater Pakistani cooperation to address what is seen as a major weakness of the current US approach in Afghanistan: the existence of safe havens in Pakistan from which insurgents launch attacks in Afghanistan. Obama made shifting resources to the war in Afghanistan a feature of his presidential campaign and he has ordered the deployment of 17,000 additional US troops to the country on top of the 38,000 already serving there. If it boosts development aid to Pakistan, the White House would embrace an approach laid out by Vice President Joe Biden when he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and by the panel's senior Republican, Senator Richard Lugar. Legislation backed by the two, and by the panel's new chairman, Democratic Senator John Kerry, called for giving an extra $1.5 billion a year in non-military aid to Pakistan over five years, amounting to a total of $7.5 billion. “The basic approach to Pakistan is the one that comes out of the ... legislation, and that is that the first thing that you have got to do with Pakistan is convince Pakistanis that you are there with them for the long term and that you don't just love them for their terrorists,” said the official. “The approach in the legislation was to increase the non-military assistance ... to help build a more stable modern Pakistani society and government and then provide military assistance that helps them fight terrorism,” he said, adding that the aid was likely to come with conditions.
