Former Rare Staff
When it comes to certain nations, no amount of money or aid the United States gives them seems to be enough to get them to show even a little respect in return. Few have demonstrated this more than Pakistan.
Videos by Rare
As Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) highlighted recently, Pakistan doesn’t behave like an ally should. Protesters there burn the American flag, Christians are routinely killed, civilians are punished harshly for straying outside strict Islamic guidelines, and the country has even been a safe haven for terrorists.
“At the very least, if you’re giving people money, they ought to be your friend and they ought to behave and they ought to be your ally,” said Paul during a Fox News interview. “There’s some people who question whether Pakistani intelligence actually cooperates with the Haqqani network that actually kills our soldiers across the border in Afghanistan.”
Paul’s comments come after Trump wondered aloud on Twitter why we give foreign aid to Pakistan by the billions in return for little to no cooperation, and its unwillingness to work with the U.S. any further after the Jerusalem declaration from Trump.
Both Trump and Paul are correct. Pakistan isn’t the ally you would expect, given the billions we’ve sent them. Do they combat terrorist groups in the region? Yes, but they do so selectively. Pakistan picks and chooses who they will fight, and who they will promote in accordance with their self-interest.
They assisted us in Afghanistan because it wants the country brought under Pakistani control, as retired U.S. Army Reserve Colonel Lawrence Sellin explained in the Washington Examiner, “Pakistan has always viewed Afghanistan as a client state, a security buffer against what they consider potential Indian encirclement and as a springboard to extend their own influence into the resource-rich areas of Central Asia.” Sellin added, “Now Pakistan has significant economic incentive to exclude western countries from maintaining any influence in Afghanistan.”
Meanwhile, Pakistan funds terrorist groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba in its proxy war against India. It’s also a big fan of the Taliban and harbored Osama Bin-Laden for years before he was discovered by U.S. intelligence, and subsequently killed by U.S. forces.
The bottom line is we were paying a country who works for U.S. goals with its weak hand, and harbors and promotes useful terrorists with its dominant hand.
But Paul didn’t just settle for agreeing with Trump on Pakistan. The Kentucky Senator has his eyes on a plethora of countries that need to have its aid reduced or 100 percent eliminated.
“It’s not only Pakistan that we pay billions of dollars to for nothing, but also many other countries,” Paul noted during Fox News his interview.
To elaborate on Paul’s statement, another entity we also give aid to in the billions is the Palestinian Authority (PA).
The PA incentivizes the murder of Israelis with government positions and monthly payments in the thousands. One of the latest examples was Omar al-Abed who ritualistically slaughtered members of a Jewish family in their home as they prepared for dinner to celebrate the birth of a child. Al Abed managed to kill three family members before a neighbor was able to stop him and capture him alive.
According to PA’s finance budget, terrorists who kill Israeli Jews receive a monthly salary of $1,000 per Jew that they kill from the PA government. This means that al-Abed will receive $3,000 a month for murdering innocent people. Since he’ll be in jail for 30 years, al-Abed’s family will receive the monthly payments, which far outstrip the average payments given to Palestinian workers who average just over $1,000 a month.
Al-Abed will also be given the office and rank of “minister” when he gets out of prison. For people under the PA, terrorism and the murder of innocents is a way to wealth and prosperity.
And the United States helps pay for it.
According to Fox News, the United States gave the PA $133 million in aid in 2016 alone. To break it down for you, we all go to work, our money is taken by the U.S. government via taxes, and those taxes turned into aid, and that aid money being used to help pay Islamic radicals to kill innocent Israeli citizens.
Sen. Paul attempted to defund the PA in 2015, having recognized its links to terrorism, but this effort was blocked by Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn) who believed the bill should be gone over by the Foreign Relations Committee, of which Corker was chair.
Why Paul’s effort was blocked is still beyond understanding, but with Trump using his first tweets of 2018 to turn his guns on Pakistan – and now, also the PA – Paul has all the momentum he needs to try again.
With a series of bills or one overarching bill, Paul could stop U.S. taxpayers from being involved in state-sponsored terrorism, the deaths of innocents, and weaken groups whose anti-American leaders make them poor allies to begin with.
