Making Pakistan’s economy more fragile, its long-time partner Australia has refused to provide more financial aid to the country. The Australian government has decided to cease all bilateral aid to Pakistan, which includes support for successful programmes helping poor women and girls.
This comes as a major slap to Pakistan which has been misusing the funds given to it in aid by various countries as humanitarian and development assistance including the UK and the USA.
Australia has a 70-year history of providing aid to Pakistan but will end all government to government development assistance in the year 2020-21, The Sydney Morning Herald reported the latest aid programme performance report on Pakistan as saying.
The Australian government should also end other Australian humanitarian and “regional” funding such as scholarships for study in Australia apart from the bilateral aid as Pakistan’s corrupt system would never let any humanitarian programme succeed in its purpose.
The terrorist nation has nothing to do with development there, the only thing it is concerned with is how to spread terrorism. It cares less about its economy as long it’s another child –terrorism does not suffer. Despite its fragile state of the economy, Pakistan utilises a huge amount of money and resources in propaganda against India. Pakistan desperately needs more revenue or aid from other nations in order to satisfy the hunger of its mammoth military, for the first time in a decade, the defence spending has been frozen with Imran Khan’s government bucking the trend of giving an annual hike to the Army which had become a norm.
Recently, the United States had slashed the aid to cash-strapped Pakistan by nearly USD 440 million, the aid used to be disbursed under the Pakistan Enhanced Partnership Agreement (PEPA) 2010. The US even had warned Pakistan about diverting aids. The officials had also warned Pakistan that it will have to demonstrate that it can spend relief funds transparently in rebuilding the nation after its massive floods in the year 2010.
Taking a note from this, the UK should also slash its financial support to the country as it has been diverting the funds suspiciously. It has already been revealed that buildings in more than 9 in 10 schools in Pakistan delivered under a £107mn project funded by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development are not fit for purpose.
Pakistan’s track record is not good when it comes to utilising foreign aid, there is always suspicion with prevalent corruption and flourishing terror outfits. The number of terror outfits and their ever-increasing funding should be a matter of concern for all the countries which provide aid to Pakistan.
