U.S. Senator John Kerry To Focus on Pakistan

Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at 10:27 am

WASHINGTON: The incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. John Kerry, said on Monday he will push for tripling non-military U.S. aid to Pakistan, putting that country and Afghanistan at the top of his panel’s agenda in the new Congress.

In an interview to a foreign news agency, Kerry said he also hoped to revive the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would commit United States to refrain from nuclear testing. The Senate rejected the treaty in 1999.

Kerry, who visited Pakistan in December and met President Asif Ali Zardari, wants to advance legislation similar to a Senate measure drafted last year by Vice President-elect Joe Biden that increases economic assistance to Pakistan to help fight terrorism in the nuclear-armed state.

“I think it is essential,” Kerry said in the telephone interview. “They (Pakistan) have a huge economic crisis. If anything winds up being one of the triggers for chaos in the country, it’s going to be the economic implosion, as much as anything else.”

Biden, a senator from Delaware and the outgoing chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, takes up his new office with President-elect Barack Obama next week. He visited both Afghanistan and Pakistan in the last few days.

The Pakistan aid bill Biden authored last year with Indiana Republican Sen. Richard Lugar would have authorized a tripling of nonmilitary aid to Islamabad, to $1.5 billion annually, for five years.

The cash was to go to help improve schools, build clinics, drill wells and reform police in Pakistan. In his former post as a senator from Illinois, Obama also signed on as a co-sponsor.

“We will be reviewing that we are going to be focusing on that very quickly,” said Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat.

The Biden-Lugar measure was passed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in July but never got a vote in the full Senate.

“Look, we can spend $12 billion a month in Iraq, or we can spend over a couple of years $1.5 billion to reduce the potential of terror in the very place where the top terrorists live,” Kerry said. “It’s not a very complicated equation as far as I’m concerned.”

U.S. Senator John Kerry To Focus on Pakistan

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