Waqas 48 Posted May 22, 2009 WASHINGTON: Several US senators on Thursday vowed to impose conditions on proposed military assistance to Pakistan, saying that past aid had been delivered without strings attached. Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee issued the warning to the top US military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, who was grilled over an administration request for 400 million dollars to help Islamabad with counter-insurgency operations against Islamist militants. "There is a significant unease here in Congress over what has happened previously in the transfer of our funds," Democrat John Kerry, chairman of the committee, told the admiral. The senator said that under the previous administration, there was little accountability for billions of dollars'' worth of military assistance for Pakistan. "Many of us did not learn until last year some time that for those six or seven years that the prior administration was transferring very significant sums of money to Pakistan, we didn''t have a clue where it was going," Kerry said. "And we learned subsequently that most of it was going into their general budget. That is not going to fly here and they need to know that," he said. Kerry and other senators said they had proposed legislation that would ensure "adequate levels of scrutiny, accountability." Senator Jim Webb, a Democrat from Virginia, said he had introduced an amendment that would prohibit the funds from being used to support the development or deployment of Pakistan''s nuclear weapons. President Barack Obama''s administration is asking for 400 million dollars to bolster Pakistan''s counter-insurgency resources as part of a supplemental budget request for 2009. The administration hopes to secure 700 million dollars for the same program for fiscal year 2010, officials said. The "Pakistan counter-insurgency capability fund" would be managed by the head of Central Command, General David Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
