Is the government right to commit extra aid to Pakistan?

Should the government commit extra aid to Pakistan? Conservative MPs Rehman Chishti and Philip Davies disagree.

Yes
Rehman Chishti
Conservative MP for Gillingham and Rainham and a former adviser to Benazir Bhutto

I very much welcome the prime minister’s recent commitment of £650m in aid to Pakistan to assist with education. No society can hope to flourish in the 21st century if only 56 per cent of children see the inside of a primary school – some for as little as one year. The UK needs Pakistan to flourish and be stable. Why does good universal education matter? It drives up economic progress, builds social cohesion and plays a part in helping make Pakistan’s security better.

Children who can read and write gain more control over their lives, are less prone to bizarre anti-West conspiracy theories peddled by the religious extremists, and are less prone to becoming suicide bombers. Further, they are less likely to be sucked into criminal sectarian ethnic violence and more likely to find or create gainful employment.

It is vital that children gain access to a broad curriculum education rather than religious madrasas which were the breeding ground for the mujahideen in the 1980s in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s frontline role and support of the international community led to radicalisation spreading from across Afghanistan into Pakistan. It is vital that universal access to education is applicable to girls. We know that people who are educated have fewer children, easing Pakistan’s huge demographic pressures. The Pakistan population is set to rise to 340 million by 2050, making it the fifth-largest population in the word.

In my view, a world without education and skills leads to poverty. According to the words of the former prime minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto: “The neglect of rising poverty against the background of religious extremism can only complicate an already difficult world situation.”

I end with a quote from Greg Mortenson’s book Three Cups of Tea: “Education in general is a powerful tool to provide alternatives to the illiterate, improvised areas that are recruiting groundsfor terror.”

No
Philip Davies
Conservative MP for Shipley

Against the backdrop of UK economic belttightening, cost-savings and cutbacks, the prime minster announced an extra £650m of aid to Pakistan, the biggest overseas aid project in British history. This is wholly unacceptable on two levels. Firstly because the UK simply cannot afford it, and secondly because there is no evidence at all to suggest that spending this money will do anything to make Britain more secure.

First and foremost is the financial reality. The UK government is borrowing over £400m a day and is paying £120m a day in debt interest payments. Why on earth should we borrow even more money to hand over to Pakistan? In contrast, Pakistan’s real-terms GDP growth projections are set to rise by five per cent by 2013. The 2011 budget estimate for the Pakistani Ministry of Defence is £3,359,195,000, which includes contracts to buy 36 Chinese J-10 fighter jets worth £860m and ordering six submarines from Beijing at a cost of £140m each.

Military analysts have suggested that the £650m could keep the RAF’s Harrier jump jets flying for another four years, fund 4,000 British infantry privates for a further five years, or pay for 25 Apache attack helicopters and train the pilots to fly them. During his visit to Pakistan, the prime minister pledged that the aid would help train 90,000 new teachers and educate a further four million Pakistani children. However, if Pakistan can buy submarines it can afford to educate its children. At the same time, statistics for 2008/09 showed that more than 2.8 million children were in poverty in the UK. On the security front, only last year the prime minister referred to Pakistan as promoting the “export of terror” and criticised it for “looking both ways” when it came to fighting terrorism.

This view was reiterated in an independent report produced by the London School of Economics in 2010 which found that support for the Afghan Taliban was “official policy” of the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence. The report also suggested that the support was “at an operational level and at a strategic level, right at the senior leadership of the Taliban movement”, before concluding that “Pakistan appears to be playing a double-game of astonishing magnitude.”

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