Donors Pledge to Donate $5 Billion to Pakistan
International donors, led by the United States and Japan, pledged more than $5 billion Friday to stabilize Pakistan’s troubled economy and fight the spread of terrorism in the Islamic nation and neighboring Afghanistan.
The U.S. and Japan started off the one-day conference by pledging $1 billion each. Saudi Arabia added $700 million and the EU $640 million. The total pledged was $5.28 billion, according to Pakistan’s foreign minister.
It’s such an incredibly difficult situation. On the one hand, it is not exactly useful to throw billions of dollars away. You might as well burn it. Which is quite likely the equivalent of giving it to Islamabad.
On the other hand, the West – and other countries in the region – cannot allow Pakistan to collapse either. It is too powerful, too influential, too big, and it has nuclear weapons. History has taught us what can happen when a country become destabilized and is thrown into chaos: radicals can take over.
President Zardari understands the above all too well, and uses it to convince foreign governments to support his country. “There is a desire to help Pakistan,” he said, but he added that the international community is still trying to grasp the implications of the problems his country faces.
“I still fear that the understanding of the danger that Pakistan faces still does not register fully in the minds of the world,” he said. “If we lose, you lose. If we lose, the world loses.”
He is, sadly, right.
That does not mean, however, that we lose if Zardari loses. We may “win” nonetheless. Pakistan and Zardari aren’t one and the same, just like his country survived without Musharraf.
Still, there seems to be no other option right now than to keep Pakistan alive by supporting its new president.
