Bernd Debusmann

In the flurry of statements on the killing of Osama bin Laden, a remark from Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, Husain Haqqani, spoke volumes about how U.S. foreign aid tends to be perceived by its recipients. It’s not enough.

“The United States spent much more money in Iraq than it did in Afghanistan,” Haqqani said in a television interview. “And then it spent much more in Afghanistan than it did in Pakistan. So were there cracks through which things fell through? Absolutely.”

That twisted logic suggests that if only Washington had given Pakistan a few billion more than the $20.7 billion it provided over the past decade, bin Laden, a man with a $27 million bounty on his head, would not have “fallen through the cracks.” Those cracks were wide enough to swallow bin Laden’s one-acre walled compound with a three-storey building in a garrison town near the Pakistani capital.

The mass murderer’s six-year stay in Abbottabad has prompted some members of Congress to demand the immediate suspension of aid to Pakistan, others to look for reductions. Deep cuts, however, are unlikely. The 140,000 U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan rely on supplies landed at the Pakistani port of Karachi and trucked through the Khyber Pass to bases in Afghanistan.

As Michael Scheuer, the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s bin Laden unit, puts it: “They (the Pakistanis) know we need them more than they need us. They also know that the Saudis and the Chinese would step in with money and aid if we backed out.”

Consequently, military and civilian aid is likely to continue flowing and the strained marriage of convenience between the U.S. and Pakistan will survive this latest spat. But giving billions of dollars to a country where, according to President Barack Obama, “we think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden” will probably rekindle a long-running debate over the how and why of foreign aid as a whole.

The United States is the world’s biggest donor of foreign aid, giving more than the runners-up, France and Germany, put together. Last year, Washington provided assistance in one form or another to 149 countries, according to the Congressional Research Service, the research arm of Congress. That’s almost four-fifths of all the countries on earth but the aid has not made the United States the world’s most popular country.

On the contrary. Why? There are a variety of reasons, including one that is not often mentioned in policy debates on aid. It has to do with human nature, according to Ken Adelman, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In a recent essay in Foreign Policy magazine, he wrote: “Giving someone a gift generates initial gratitude (often along with gripes about why it wasn’t bigger). The second time the gift generates less gratitude (and more such griping). By the third iteration, it has become an entitlement. The slightest decline engenders resentment.”

NEGATIVE VIEWS
Perversely, in Pakistan and Egypt, two of the four countries that topped the list of U.S. aid recipients in 2010, the publics hold overwhelmingly unfavorable views of the United States, according to the annual global attitudes survey by the Pew Research Center, a Washington-based think tank.

For decades, Washington has seen foreign assistance as an essential instrument of foreign policy, meant in part to positively influence attitudes abroad. This works in some of the large variety of activities that come under the label foreign assistance – for example reducing poverty, widening access to health care and education, or promoting human rights. But even U.S. disaster relief, often prompt and efficient, does not always change attitudes, viz American emergency aid in the wake of last year’s devastating floods in Pakistan.

If foreign assistance does not buy gratitude, loyalty and cooperation, does it help to influence the decision-making of friendly governments? Not necessarily. Take the example of Israel, the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since its creation in 1948. Despite the aid, the government has continued building Jewish settlements on the West Bank contrary to U.S. wishes and contrary to international law.

So, is foreign assistance to 149 countries reflected in votes in support of U.S. positions at the United Nations (which has 192 members)? It is not. According to a study by the conservative Heritage Foundation, about 95 percent of U.N. member states that receive U.S. assistance voted against the United States in General Assembly votes between 2000 and 2008.

That helps explain why opinion polls consistently show that the majority of Americans are in favor of cutting foreign aid. The latest survey, in January by Gallup, showed 59 percent wanted reductions. Those results would probably look different if Americans had a clearer idea of how much of their tax money goes to helping foreign countries.

A series of studies shows that the public vastly overestimates the share of the budget that goes to foreign assistance – widespread perceptions put it at around 20 percent. In fact, in 2010, it was just 1.1 percent.  (You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters)

These must be difficult times for Osama bin Laden and his Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The uprising that swept away Hosni Mubarak after 18 days of huge demonstrations, none in the name of Islam, does not fit their ideology. In the war of ideas, al Qaeda suffered a major defeat.

Its leaders preach that the way to remove “apostate” rulers — and Mubarak was high on the list — is through violence. Al Qaeda’s ideology does not embrace the kind of people power that brought down the Berlin wall, forced Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines into exile, and filled Cairo’s Tahrir Square with tens of thousands of peaceful protesters day after day.

They waved the red-white-and-black flags of Egypt, not the green banners of Islam, in peaceful demonstrations that amounted to “a huge defeat in a country of central importance to its image,” in the words of Noman Benotman, the former leader of a Libyan group often aligned with al Qaeda. “We are witnessing Osama bin Laden’s nightmare,” wrote Shibley Telhami, an Arab scholar at the University of Maryland.

Long before al Qaeda struck against what it calls “the far enemy” on Sept. 11, 2001, its leaders exhorted Arabs to take on the “near enemy” — Arab regimes that failed to run their countries under sharia law — with bloody attacks against its leaders and institutions. Violent jihad was the only way. First Tunisia, then Egypt, showed that the argument was flawed.

Which is probably the reason al Qaeda, an organization of considerable Internet savvy and communications skills, has been largely silent on the unrest that first flared in Tunisia, rolled over to Egypt and now keeps rulers awake at night from Algeria to Saudi Arabia, Syria and Bahrain.

According to SITE, a U.S.-based organization that monitors statements from al Qaeda, its offshoots and followers, the first reaction to the turmoil in Egypt came on Feb. 8, day 15 of the mass uprising, in an online forum. The “doors of martyrdom” had opened, the message said, and Egyptians must ignore secularism, democracy and nationalism.

With peaceful demonstrators jamming Tahrir Square, calls to martyrdom sounded as irrelevant and off-key as some of the statements from the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama which zigged, zagged and at least initially shone a spotlight on Washington’s decades-old policy of backing dictators detested by the people they rule.

America’s top diplomat, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, looked particularly out of touch, with her remark, on the first day of the mass protests, that “our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interest of the Egyptian people.”

That raised some eyebrows but should not have come as a surprise, coming from the woman who, during her first visit to Egypt in 2009, said that “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family and I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States.”

AL QAEDA BYPASSED IN THE STREETS OF CAIRO
Why bin Laden and al-Zawahiri have remained silent is a matter of conjecture. Some U.S. experts think that the two are bottled up in the mountains along the Afghan-Pakistani border by American drone strikes and have logistical problems getting a message out. Others say the murderous pair realize it would sound hollow.

“Al Qaeda and Zawahiri know they have been bypassed in the streets of Cairo,” wrote Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official now with the Brooking Institution, a Washington think-tank. “This is not their revolution and they are not its inspiration…” The worst thing that could happen to al Qaeda’s credibility, Riedel argues, would be a post-Mubarak future in which the Muslim Brotherhood, after free and fair elections, would form part of a government coalition and contribute to reforming the country.

That would fly in the face of bin Laden’s philosophy that Islam must triumph over democracy, not participate in it.

The kind of nuanced argument Riedel and other experts are making goes down badly with America’s right-wing radio and cable TV talk show hosts who tend to conflate Islam with terrorism. Some of them portray a nightmarish sequence of events stemming from the popular uprising in the Arab world’s biggest country.

The Muslim Brotherhood, so the fear-mongering forecasts goes, will take control of Egypt. From there, an Islamist wave will roll over Arab country after Arab country. Europe will come next. And eventually the United States. The word “Islamist” is enough to strike fear into the hearts of many Americans.

It is a fear based on ignorance, sometimes wilfull ignorance, and is given voice by politicians who should know better. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican chairwoman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, has warned against allowing the Brotherhood to emerge as a powerful force. How so? By America rigging Egyptian elections?

Tim Pawlenty, a possible Republican contender for the 2012 presidential elections, has rebuked President Obama for saying that the Brotherhood “is one faction in Egypt. They don’t have majority support in Egypt.” In the Islam-will-destroy-us-all camp, this amounts to “appeasement.”

So, it is reassuring to know that America’s top spy, James Clapper, sees the link between the Muslim Brotherhood gaining political space and the adverse effect that would have on al Qaeda. “With respect to what’s going on in Egypt,” he told a House Intelligence Committee hearing, “there is potentially a great opportunity here to come up with a counter-narrative to al Qaeda.”

There is.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)