Nice article by Hitchens. I completely agree with him. It's time to cut the Pakistanis off.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/07/osama-bin-laden-201107
QuoteFrom Abbottabad to Worse
Hating the United States—which funds Islamabad's army and nuclear program to the humiliating tune of $3 billion a year—Pakistan takes its twisted, cowardly revenge by harboring the likes of the late Osama bin Laden. But the hypocrisy is mutual, and the shame should be shared.
By Christopher Hitchens•
Illustration by Barry Blitt
July 2011
Salman Rushdie's upsettingly brilliant psycho-profile of Pakistan, in his 1983 novel, Shame, rightly laid emphasis on the crucial part played by sexual repression in the Islamic republic. And that was before the Talibanization of Afghanistan, and of much of Pakistan, too. Let me try to summarize and update the situation like this: Here is a society where rape is not a crime. It is a punishment. Women can be sentenced to be raped, by tribal and religious kangaroo courts, if even a rumor of their immodesty brings shame on their menfolk. In such an obscenely distorted context, the counterpart term to shame—which is the noble word "honor"—becomes most commonly associated with the word "killing." Moral courage consists of the willingness to butcher your own daughter.
If the most elemental of human instincts becomes warped in this bizarre manner, other morbid symptoms will disclose themselves as well. Thus, President Asif Ali Zardari cringes daily in front of the forces who openly murdered his wife, Benazir Bhutto, and who then contemptuously ordered the crime scene cleansed with fire hoses, as if to spit even on the pretense of an investigation. A man so lacking in pride—indeed lacking in manliness—will seek desperately to compensate in other ways. Swelling his puny chest even more, he promises to resist the mighty United States, and to defend Pakistan's holy "sovereignty." This puffery and posing might perhaps possess a rag of credibility if he and his fellow middlemen were not avidly ingesting $3 billion worth of American subsidies every year.
There's absolutely no mystery to the "Why do they hate us?" question, at least as it arises in Pakistan. They hate us because they owe us, and are dependent upon us. The two main symbols of Pakistan's pride—its army and its nuclear program—are wholly parasitic on American indulgence and patronage. But, as I wrote for Vanity Fair in late 2001, in a long report from this degraded country, that army and those nukes are intended to be reserved for war against the neighboring democracy of India. Our bought-and-paid-for pretense that they have any other true purpose has led to a rancid, resentful official hypocrisy, and to a state policy of revenge, large and petty, on the big, rich, dumb Americans who foot the bill. If Pakistan were a character, it would resemble the one described by Alexander Pope in his Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot:
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike.
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike:
Alike reserved to blame, or to commend,
A timorous foe, and a suspicious friend ...
So well-bred Spaniels civilly delight
In mumbling of the game they dare not bite.
There's an old cliché in client-state relations, about the tail wagging the dog, but have we really considered what it means when we actually are the tail, and the dog is our goddam lapdog? The lapdog's surreptitious revenge has consisted in the provision of kennels for attack dogs. Everybody knew that the Taliban was originally an instrument for Pakistani colonization of Afghanistan. Everybody knew that al-Qaeda forces were being sheltered in the Pakistani frontier town of Quetta, and that Khalid Sheikh Muhammed was found hiding in Rawalpindi, the headquarters of the Pakistani Army. Bernard-Henri Lévy once even produced a damning time line showing that every Pakistani "capture" of a wanted jihadist had occurred the week immediately preceding a vote in Congress on subventions to the government in Islamabad. But not even I was cynical enough to believe that Osama bin Laden himself would be given a villa in a Pakistani garrison town on Islamabad's periphery. I quote below from a letter written by my Pakistani friend Irfan Khawaja, a teacher of philosophy at Felician College, in New Jersey. He sent it to me in anguish just after bin Laden, who claimed to love death more than life, had met his presumably desired rendezvous:
I find, however, that I can't quite share in the sense of jubilation. I never believed that bin Laden was living in some hideaway "in the tribal areas." But to learn that he was living in Abbottabad, after Khalid Sheikh Muhammed was discovered in Rawalpindi, is really too much for me. I don't feel jubilation. I feel a personal, ineradicable sense of betrayal. For ten years, I've watched members of my own family taking to the streets, protesting the US military presence in northern Pakistan and the drone strikes etc. They stood there and prattled on and on about "Pakistan's sovereignty," and the supposed invasion of it by US forces.
Well, what fucking sovereignty? What fucking sovereignty were these people "protecting"? It's bad enough that the Pakistani army lacks sovereignty over the tribal area and can't control it when the country's own life depends upon it. But that bin Laden was living in the Pakistani equivalent of Annapolis, MD ...
You will notice that Irfan is here registering genuine shame, in the sense of proper outrage and personal embarrassment, and not some vicarious parody of emotion where it is always others—usually powerless women—who are supposedly bringing the shame on you.
If the Pakistani authorities had admitted what they were doing, and claimed the right to offer safe haven to al-Qaeda and the Taliban on their own soil, then the boast of "sovereignty" might at least have had some grotesque validity to it. But they were too cowardly and duplicitous for that. And they also wanted to be paid, lavishly and regularly, for pretending to fight against those very forces. Has any state ever been, in the strict sense of the term, more shameless? Over the years, I have written many pages about the sick relationship between the United States and various Third World client regimes, many of which turned out to be false friends as well as highly discreditable ones. General Pinochet, of Chile, had the unbelievable nerve to explode a car bomb in rush-hour traffic in Washington, D.C., in 1976, murdering a political rival and his American colleague. The South Vietnamese military junta made a private deal to sabotage the Paris peace talks in 1968, in order to benefit the electoral chances of Richard Nixon. Dirty money from the Shah of Iran and the Greek dictatorship made its way at different times into our electoral process. Israeli religious extremists demand American protection and then denounce us for "interference" if we demur politely about colonization of the West Bank. But our blatant manipulation by Pakistan is the most diseased and rotten thing in which the United States has ever involved itself. And it is also, in the grossest way, a violation of our sovereignty. Pakistan routinely—by the dispatch of barely deniable death squads across its borders, to such locations as the Taj Hotel in Mumbai—injures the sovereignty of India as well as Afghanistan. But you might call that a traditional form of violation. In our case, Pakistan ingratiatingly and silkily invites young Americans to one of the vilest and most dangerous regions on earth, there to fight and die as its allies, all the while sharpening a blade for their backs. "The smiler with the knife under the cloak," as Chaucer phrased it so frigidly. (At our feet, and at our throat: Perfectly symbolic of the underhanded duality between the mercenary and the sycophant was the decision of the Pakistani intelligence services, in revenge for the Abbottabad raid, to disclose the name of the C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad.)
This is well beyond humiliation. It makes us a prisoner of the shame, and co-responsible for it. The United States was shamed when it became the Cold War armorer of the Ayub Khan dictatorship in the 1950s and 1960s. It was shamed even more when it supported General Yahya Khan's mass murder in Bangladesh in 1971: a Muslim-on-Muslim genocide that crashingly demonstrated the utter failure of a state based on a single religion. We were then played for suckers by yet another military boss in the form of General Zia-ul-Haq, who leveraged anti-Communism in Afghanistan into a free pass for the acquisition of nuclear weapons and the open mockery of the nonproliferation treaty. By the start of the millennium, Pakistan had become home to a Walmart of fissile material, traded as far away as Libya and North Korea by the state-subsidized nuclear entrepreneur A. Q. Khan, the country's nearest approach (which in itself tells you something) to a national hero. Among the scientists working on the project were three named sympathizers of the Taliban. And that gigantic betrayal, too, was uncovered only by chance.
Again to quote myself from 2001, if Pakistan were a person, he (and it would have to be a he) would have to be completely humorless, paranoid, insecure, eager to take offense, and suffering from self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred. That last triptych of vices is intimately connected. The self-righteousness comes from the claim to represent a religion: the very name "Pakistan" is an acronym of Punjab, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and so forth, the resulting word in the Urdu language meaning "Land of the Pure." The self-pity derives from the sad fact that the country has almost nothing else to be proud of: virtually barren of achievements and historically based on the amputation and mutilation of India in 1947 and its own self-mutilation in Bangladesh. The self-hatred is the consequence of being pathetically, permanently mendicant: an abject begging-bowl country that is nonetheless run by a super-rich and hyper-corrupt Punjabi elite. As for paranoia: This not so hypothetical Pakistani would also be a hardened anti-Semite, moaning with pleasure at the butchery of Daniel Pearl and addicted to blaming his self-inflicted woes on the all-powerful Jews.
This dreary story actually does have some bearing on the "sovereignty" issue. In the beginning, all that the Muslim League demanded from the British was "a state for Muslims." Pakistan's founder and first president, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was a relatively secular man whose younger sister went around unveiled and whose second wife did not practice Islam at all. But there's a world of difference between a state for Muslims and a full-on Muslim state. Under the rule of General Zia there began to be imposition of Shari'a and increased persecution of non-Muslims as well as of Muslim minorities such as the Shiites, Ismailis, and Ahmadis. In recent years these theocratic tendencies have intensified with appalling speed, to the point where the state contains not one but two secret statelets within itself: the first an impenetrable enclave of covert nuclear command and control and the second a private nexus of power at the disposal of the military intelligence services and—until recently—Osama bin Laden himself. It's the sovereignty of these possessions that exercises General Ashfaq Kayani, head of the Pakistani Army, who five days after Abbottabad made the arrogant demand that the number of American forces in the country be reduced "to the minimum essential." He even said that any similar American action ought to warrant a "review" of the whole relationship between the two countries. How pitiful it is that a Pakistani and not an American should have been the first (and so far the only) leader to say those necessary things.
If we ever ceased to swallow our pride, so I am incessantly told in Washington, then the Pakistani oligarchy might behave even more abysmally than it already does, and the situation deteriorate even further. This stale and superficial argument ignores the awful historical fact that, each time the Pakistani leadership did get worse, or behave worse, it was handsomely rewarded by the United States. We have been the enablers of every stage of that wretched state's counter-evolution, to the point where it is a serious regional menace and an undisguised ally of our worst enemy, as well as the sworn enemy of some of our best allies. How could it be "worse" if we shifted our alliance and instead embraced India, our only rival in scale as a multi-ethnic and multi-religious democracy, and a nation that contains nearly as many Muslims as Pakistan? How could it be "worse" if we listened to the brave Afghans, like their former intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh, who have been telling us for years that we are fighting the war in the wrong country?
If we continue to deny or avoid this inescapable fact, then we really are dishonoring, as well as further endangering, our exemplary young volunteers. Why was the raid on Abbottabad so rightly called "daring"? Because it had to be conducted under the radar of the Pakistani Air Force, which "scrambled" its jets and would have brought the Black Hawks down if it could. That this is true is bad enough in all conscience. That we should still be submitting ourselves to lectures and admonitions from General Kayani is beyond shameful.
That's all well and good, but exactly how are we to supply NATO soldiers in Afghanistan with out Pakistani approval? There's not exactly a lot of good routes into the country.
Quote from: Razgovory on June 08, 2011, 06:38:20 AM
That's all well and good, but exactly how are we to supply NATO soldiers in Afghanistan with out Pakistani approval? There's not exactly a lot of good routes into the country.
Surely the bases in Central Asia we spend shitloads of money and political capital to maintain are not totally useless. Besides Pakistan seems like a pretty unreliable supply line.
Of course we never should have occupied Afghanistan to begin with...
Quote from: Valmy on June 08, 2011, 07:56:40 AM
Quote from: Razgovory on June 08, 2011, 06:38:20 AM
That's all well and good, but exactly how are we to supply NATO soldiers in Afghanistan with out Pakistani approval? There's not exactly a lot of good routes into the country.
Surely the bases in Central Asia we spend shitloads of money and political capital to maintain are not totally useless. Besides Pakistan seems like a pretty unreliable supply line.
Of course we never should have occupied Afghanistan to begin with...
Well, the US left many off those bases earlier in the last decade, largely due to Russian prodding. I've heard that there were plans to move supply from Georgia, to Azerbaijan, then across the Caspian to either Kazakhstan or Turkmenistan. Not sure if those are being heavily used right now or not. Still they are fairly weak routes since the chain can break if any one of those countries opts out. If Russia feels like putting the pressure on us, they wouldn't have much difficultly closing those routes. That is after all, their sphere of influence.
How much money were we giving those countries? We'll have three billion more dollars to offer if we pull out of Pakistan.
Don't worry Tim, I imagine that Pakistan will openly turn against us eventually. As it is, I think the US should try to exploit the relationship with Pakistan as long as possible.
Quote from: Razgovory on June 08, 2011, 08:42:49 AM
Don't worry Tim, I imagine that Pakistan will openly turn against us eventually. As it is, I think the US should try to exploit the relationship with Pakistan as long as possible.
Heh no they won't. That would mean we would get closer to India.
I think Pakistan has already turned against us, there is no "eventually" about it.
I don't have much problem with pragmatic exploitation of our enemies for our own gain, but I am not sure we are getting much for our $3 billion/year.
Yeah, it does provide us access to Afghanistan, but on the other hand...that is climbing into bed with one snake in order to fight another snake. And what is worse, fighting Afghanistan is probably just making the exact same problem in Pakistan a lot worse!
I don't really know what the right solution is though.
Quote from: Berkut on June 08, 2011, 08:55:25 AM
I think Pakistan has already turned against us, there is no "eventually" about it.
I don't have much problem with pragmatic exploitation of our enemies for our own gain, but I am not sure we are getting much for our $3 billion/year.
Yeah, it does provide us access to Afghanistan, but on the other hand...that is climbing into bed with one snake in order to fight another snake. And what is worse, fighting Afghanistan is probably just making the exact same problem in Pakistan a lot worse!
I don't really know what the right solution is though.
Yes, Pakistan has turned against us, but lucky, Pakistan has not turned against us. Pakistanis recognize that they need the help of the US to have any chance of asserting sovereignty over their frontier regions, and Pakistanis want the US to get the hell out and stay out. Pakistanis want to be modern, and Pakistanis reject modernity.
See how meaningless is it to talk about what Pakistan is or wants or is worth? It is too fragmented to have any such sweeping statements hold any real meaning.
Quote from: Valmy on June 08, 2011, 08:49:51 AM
Quote from: Razgovory on June 08, 2011, 08:42:49 AM
Don't worry Tim, I imagine that Pakistan will openly turn against us eventually. As it is, I think the US should try to exploit the relationship with Pakistan as long as possible.
Heh no they won't. That would mean we would get closer to India.
The Iranians had no problem turning against us despite the fact that their geopolitical situation did not favor it.
Quote from: Razgovory on June 08, 2011, 08:30:25 AM
Quote from: Valmy on June 08, 2011, 07:56:40 AM
Quote from: Razgovory on June 08, 2011, 06:38:20 AM
That's all well and good, but exactly how are we to supply NATO soldiers in Afghanistan with out Pakistani approval? There's not exactly a lot of good routes into the country.
Surely the bases in Central Asia we spend shitloads of money and political capital to maintain are not totally useless. Besides Pakistan seems like a pretty unreliable supply line.
Of course we never should have occupied Afghanistan to begin with...
Well, the US left many off those bases earlier in the last decade, largely due to Russian prodding. I've heard that there were plans to move supply from Georgia, to Azerbaijan, then across the Caspian to either Kazakhstan or Turkmenistan. Not sure if those are being heavily used right now or not. Still they are fairly weak routes since the chain can break if any one of those countries opts out. If Russia feels like putting the pressure on us, they wouldn't have much difficultly closing those routes. That is after all, their sphere of influence.
US supplies already flow through Russia.
Quote from: Razgovory on June 08, 2011, 09:13:48 AM
The Iranians had no problem turning against us despite the fact that their geopolitical situation did not favor it.
Iran did not spend 24 hours a day 365 days a year obsessed with hating a single enemy.
Quote from: Valmy on June 08, 2011, 09:45:31 AM
Quote from: Razgovory on June 08, 2011, 09:13:48 AM
The Iranians had no problem turning against us despite the fact that their geopolitical situation did not favor it.
Iran did not spend 24 hours a day 365 days a year obsessed with hating a single enemy.
They did... it just happened that that enemy was the states :lol:
Quote from: HVC on June 08, 2011, 09:54:08 AM
They did... it just happened that that enemy was the states :lol:
The Iranian leadership invented an external enemy to justify its imposition of a brutal dictatorship and execution of tens of thousands of people. "Iran" didn't "turn against the US" so much as its leadership created a crisis with the US to get people to "rallly 'round the flag."
Quote from: jimmy olsen on June 08, 2011, 08:36:46 AM
How much money were we giving those countries? We'll have three billion more dollars to offer if we pull out of Pakistan.
And which port will we be using?
It would be nice if Hitch stopped beating about the bush and just came out and said what he really thinks about Pakistan.
On NPR I heard this Pakistani-American dude (the topic was fear of a backlash in the wake of the Osama assasination). He claimed Pakistan's disfunctionality was America's fault for "walking away from Pakistan" after the Soviets left Afghanistan. :D
Quote from: HisMajestyBOB on June 08, 2011, 11:05:06 AM
Quote from: jimmy olsen on June 08, 2011, 08:36:46 AM
How much money were we giving those countries? We'll have three billion more dollars to offer if we pull out of Pakistan.
And which port will we be using?
Bandar-Abbas ? :ph34r:
Quote from: The Minsky Moment on June 08, 2011, 12:31:51 PM
It would be nice if Hitch stopped beating about the bush and just came out and said what he really thinks about Pakistan.
:lol:
I find it refreshing.
<_<
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43587402/
QuoteReport: Pakistan ends US use of base for drone attacks
Ties between the two countries remain strained since the bin Laden raid
Pakistan has stopped the United States from using an air base in the southwest of the country to launch drone strikes against militant groups, the defense minister was quoted as saying, as ties remain strained between the two countries.
Pakistan has long publicly opposed the missile attacks as a violation of its sovereignty, but has in private given support including intelligence to help target members of al-Qaida and the Taliban in the northwest region along the Afghan border.
The Financial Times quoted Defense Minister Ahmed Mukhtar as saying that Pakistan had ended U.S. drone flights out of Shamsi base in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, long reported to have been used for the covert war against militants.
"No U.S. flights are taking place from Shamsi any longer. If there have to be flights from the base, it will only be Pakistani flights," Mukhtar told the newspaper.
Ties between the countries, strained since the killing of two Pakistanis by a CIA agent in January, suffered a further setback after Navy SEALs killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in a secret raid last month that Pakistani officials said further breached its sovereignty.
Pakistan's army has drastically cut down the number of U.S. troops allowed in the country and set clear limits on intelligence sharing with the United States, reflecting its anger over what it sees as continuing U.S. interference in its affairs.
Story: Gunmen kill senior Pakistani Taliban commander
Washington had been asked to remove all its infrastructure from the Shamsi air base, the Financial Times cited an unidentified Pakistan official as saying. The official, though, said, no drone flights had taken off from the base since 2009.
Since President Barack Obama took office, drone strikes have been stepped up, focused on the Waziristan region in northwest Pakistan, a hub for militants from around the world.
These attacks have further intensified since bin Laden's killing which reinforced suspicion in the United States that elements of Pakistan's security establishment may have helped hide him.
Well, better an enemy we know than a false friend, no? At least we can now fully align with India (which, despite its many failings, have a working democracy, a relative freedom of religion and pretty good business ties with the West) than a dictatorial fundamentalist shithole.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on June 08, 2011, 12:33:43 PM
On NPR I heard this Pakistani-American dude (the topic was fear of a backlash in the wake of the Osama assasination). He claimed Pakistan's disfunctionality was America's fault for "walking away from Pakistan" after the Soviets left Afghanistan. :D
I hate this attitude. The attempt to deflect responsibility and try to find a convoluted conspiracy to blame the US for all your ills is self defeating and merely perpetuates the malaise the country is in since nobody will analyze and deal with the real causes of the problem. The US only tolerated Pakistan because they needed to help the Mujahedin against the Soviets and India was friendly to the Soviets. The reason the USA walked away from Pakistan is the reason they gave at the time. Zia-ul-Haq was a horrible and evil dictator that had few if any redeeming features.
This Pakistani-American dude is part of the problem.
Quote from: grumbler on June 08, 2011, 09:02:12 AM
Quote from: Berkut on June 08, 2011, 08:55:25 AM
I think Pakistan has already turned against us, there is no "eventually" about it.
I don't have much problem with pragmatic exploitation of our enemies for our own gain, but I am not sure we are getting much for our $3 billion/year.
Yeah, it does provide us access to Afghanistan, but on the other hand...that is climbing into bed with one snake in order to fight another snake. And what is worse, fighting Afghanistan is probably just making the exact same problem in Pakistan a lot worse!
I don't really know what the right solution is though.
Yes, Pakistan has turned against us, but lucky, Pakistan has not turned against us. Pakistanis recognize that they need the help of the US to have any chance of asserting sovereignty over their frontier regions, and Pakistanis want the US to get the hell out and stay out. Pakistanis want to be modern, and Pakistanis reject modernity.
See how meaningless is it to talk about what Pakistan is or wants or is worth? It is too fragmented to have any such sweeping statements hold any real meaning.
This.
It's about damn time!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43698819/ns/world_news-the_new_york_times/
QuoteUS defers millions in Pakistani military aid
Angered that trainers are expelled, American officials want tougher stance against militants
By ERIC SCHMITT and JANE PERLEZ
updated 2 hours 28 minutes ago
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is suspending and, in some cases, canceling hundreds of millions of dollars of aid to the Pakistani military, in a move to chasten Pakistan for expelling American military trainers and to press its army to fight militants more effectively.
away
Coupled with a statement from the top American military officer last week linking Pakistan's military spy agency to the recent murder of a Pakistani journalist, the halting or withdrawal of military equipment and other aid to Pakistan illustrates the depth of the debate inside the Obama administration over how to change the behavior of one of its key counterterrorism partners.
Altogether, about $800 million in military aid and equipment, or over one-third of the more than $2 billion in annual American security assistance to Pakistan, could be affected, three senior United States officials said.
This aid includes about $300 million to reimburse Pakistan for some of the costs of deploying more than 100,000 soldiers along the Afghan border to combat terrorism, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in training assistance and military hardware, according to half a dozen Congressional, Pentagon and other administration officials who were granted anonymity to discuss the politically delicate matter.
Some of the curtailed aid is equipment that the United States wants to send but Pakistan now refuses to accept, like rifles, body armor and night-vision goggles that were withdrawn or held up after Pakistan ordered more than 100 trainers in the United States Special Forces to leave the country in recent weeks.
Some is equipment that cannot be set up, certified or used for training because Pakistan has denied visas to the American personnel needed to operate the equipment, including some surveillance gear, a senior Pentagon official said.
And some is assistance like the reimbursements for troop costs, which is being reviewed in light of questions about Pakistan's commitment to carry out counterterrorism operations. For example, the United States recently provided Pakistan with information about suspected bomb-making factories, only to have the insurgents vanish before Pakistani security forces arrived a few days later.
"When it comes to our military aid," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told a Senate committee last month "we are not prepared to continue providing that at the pace we were providing it unless and until we see certain steps taken."
American officials say they would probably resume equipment deliveries and aid if relations improve and Pakistan pursues terrorists more aggressively. The cutoffs do not affect any immediate deliveries of military sales to Pakistan, like F-16 fighter jets, or nonmilitary aid, the officials said.
Pakistan's precise military budget is not known, and while the American aid cutoff would probably have a small impact on the overall military budget, it would most directly affect the counterinsurgency campaign. The Pakistani Army spends nearly one-quarter of the nation's annual expenditures, according to K. Alan Kronstadt of the Congressional Research Service.
While some senior administration officials have concluded that Pakistan will never be the kind of partner the administration hoped for when President Obama entered office, others emphasize that the United States cannot risk a full break in relations or a complete cutoff of aid akin to what happened in the 1990s, when Pakistan was caught developing nuclear weapons.
But many of the recent aid curtailments are clearly intended to force the Pakistani military to make a difficult choice between backing the country that finances much of its operations and equipment, or continuing to provide secret support for the Taliban and other militants fighting American soldiers in Afghanistan.
"We have to continue to emphasize with the Pakistanis that in the end it's in their interest to be able to go after these targets as well," Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta told reporters on Friday en route to Afghanistan.
Some American officials say Pakistan has only itself to blame, citing the Pakistani military's decision to distance itself from American assistance in response to the humiliation suffered from the American commando raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that killed Osama bin Laden, as well as rising anger from midlevel Pakistani officers and the Pakistani public that senior military leaders, including Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the powerful army chief of staff, are too accommodating to the Americans.
Pakistan shut down the American program to help train Pakistani paramilitary troops fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the lawless border regions near Afghanistan, prompting the Americans to take with them equipment Pakistani troops used. The Central Intelligence Agency has been relying more heavily on flying armed drones from Afghanistan since Pakistan threatened to close down a base the C.I.A. was using inside the country.
But in private briefings to senior Congressional staff members last month, Pentagon officials made clear that they were taking a tougher line toward Pakistan and reassessing whether it could still be an effective partner in fighting terrorists.
"They wanted to tell us, 'Guys, we're delivering the message that this is not business as usual and we've got this under control,' " one senior Senate aide said.
Comments last week by Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also reflected a potentially more confrontational approach to Pakistan. Admiral Mullen, who is retiring in two months, became the first American official to publicly accuse Pakistan of ordering the kidnapping, torture and death of the journalist, Saleem Shahzad, whose mutilated body was found in early June.
Besides the growing tensions, the slowdown in aid can also be attributed to tightening military budgets as lawmakers seek deeper cuts in Pentagon spending to help address the mounting government debt.
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There is growing opposition on Capitol Hill to sending security assistance to Pakistan. Last week, the Republican-controlled House approved a Pentagon budget bill that limits the Defense Department from spending more than 25 percent of its projected $1.1 billion budget for training and equipping Pakistani troops next year, unless the secretaries of defense and state submit a report to Congress showing how the money will be spent to combat insurgencies.
The Pakistani military is the most important institution in the country. But it has been under intense domestic and international pressure because of the humiliation of the Bin Laden raid, an attack on Pakistan's main navy base in Karachi weeks later, and continuing fallout from the arrest and subsequent release of a C.I.A. security contractor, Raymond A. Davis, who shot and killed two Pakistanis in January in what he said was a robbery.
The United States has long debated how hard it can push Pakistan to attack militant strongholds in the tribal area. Washington, however, depends on Pakistan as a major supply route into Afghanistan. American officials also want to monitor as closely as they can Pakistan's burgeoning nuclear weapons arsenal.
The decision to hold back much of the American military aid has not been made public by the Pakistani military or the civilian government. But it is well known at the top levels of the military, and a senior Pakistani official described it as an effort by the Americans to gain "leverage."
A former Pakistani diplomat, Maleeha Lodhi, who served twice as ambassador to the United States, said the Pentagon action was short-sighted, and was likely to produce greater distance between the two countries.
"It will be repeating a historic blunder and hurting itself in the bargain by using a blunt instrument of policy at a time when it needs Pakistan's help to defeat Al Qaeda and make an honorable retreat from Afghanistan," Ms. Lodhi said of the United States.
Washington imposed sanctions on Pakistan in the 1990s, and in the process lost influence with the Pakistani military, Ms. Lodhi said. Similarly, the Obama administration would find itself out in the cold with the Pakistani Army if it held up funds, she said.
Within the Pakistani Army, the hold on American assistance would be viewed as "an unfriendly act and total disregard of the sacrifices made by the army," said Brig. Javed Hussain, a retired special forces officer.
Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and Jane Perlez from Islamabad, Pakistan. David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan.
This article, U.S. Defers Millions in Pakistani Military Aid, first appeared in The New York Times.