Waste not, want not

You may have heard that the US Congress passed (and the President signed into law) a series of massive spending bills, which included government funding for the rest of the fiscal year and additional Covid-related relief. As is usually the case in DC, the bills also included funding for a variety of special interests and pet projects. But the one which garnered the most outrage was a provision for a $10 million dollar study of gender in Pakistan, at a time many American students are not in school, their parents are not employed, and the families are looking at a measly $600 (each) bump.

“Why?” so many asked, with much anger and justification. And they deserve an answer. Foreign aid is always a touchy subject in the US, as we have so many things on which we need to spend domestically. Polls show Americans think the federal government spends about 25% of its revenue on foreign aid; the actual figure is 1%. We spend about .2% of Gross National Product, putting us behind almost all other rich nations in such giving, yet we’re still the largest donor in terms of total amount.

“Ok, ok, it’s still a lot of money, and why now, when Americans are hurting? And why to a country like Pakistan that is arguably not even much of an ally?” Well, that takes a history lesson, and one which is rich in irony with respect to foreign aid.

Way back in the 1970s, the US and Pakistan were close allies, as the US sided with the Pakistanis against their bigger, bitter rival India. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the relationship deepened, as we funneled aid through Pakistan to the mujaheddin making life impossible for the Russians in the Hindu Kush. We also tried to aid the development of a more democratic, liberal Pakistan by funding schools and clinics and the like. This wasn’t much money: it doesn’t cost much to put up a concrete building, buy some tables and books, and pay a teacher there. But who wants to vote money for their schools over say, the ones in West Virginia? So we found an alternative: another Muslim country with close ties to Pakistan that had unlimited funding: Saudi Arabia.

The House of Saud was more than willing to fund education in Pakistan. These madrassas (religious schools) excluded girls and taught the fundamentalist Wahhabi version of Islam popular in Saudi Arabia. Pakistan and Afghanistan were once considered among the most liberal Muslim states, but all that changed. Graduates of the madrassas spread throughout the region, which in turn led Pakistan and Afghanistan to become the fertile home of Al Qaeda (the base), the secure enclave from which they planned, and to which they retreated after, the 9-11 attacks.

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Now those nations are rife with anti-American, fundamentalist Islamist thought. Pakistan has determined that its Saudi-funded madrassas are a problem, and wants to fix it. America is cautiously engaging with the notion of how to recover a lost generation of Pakistanis, to change their way of thinking and remove the possibility of those countries ever being a base for terrorism again. Rather than throw money at the problem, the US government is studying what to do, so as not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

That’s the $10 million dollar study you heard about. It amounts to what the US government spends every minute. It pales in comparison to the costs of 9-11. Maybe it’s still a waste of money. Maybe someone in charge will make the study focus on gender neutral pronouns in Urdu. Maybe it won’t uncover anything useful. Educated people can disagree about this. But see how one can take any budget item out of context and make it look ridiculous? And there are many real cases of fraud,waste and abuse: ever see a bridge to nowhere built because Congressman Snodgrass wanted it? So people are right to question any budget item, but don’t fall for the easy targets and remember there is always someone out there trying to outrage you.

I’ll end with another cautionary foreign aid story. Once upon a time, the US sent doctors to developing nations to train local medical professionals in how to treat infectious diseases. We bore the costs of such programs, making the training and advice free to the other nations. We did so out of charity and out of self-interest: diseases arrested there don’t spread here. One such nation was China. China became a more developed nation, but what we began in charity we continued in self-interest.

Except Chinese-American relations hit the skids, and we decided to end the program. We pulled out our liaison from the Chinese CDC. In early 2019, we took our doctors out of the training site at the regional medical center in some city named Wuhan. We didn’t end the program because it was too expensive or China wouldn’t pay for it; we just decided cancelling it was a low-cost way to show we were angry. You know how that story ends.