Should Pakistan receive more help from the US?

Pakistan wants its share of nuclear play: After India managed to reach an agreement with the Bush Administration over a nuclear energy deal, Yousuf Raza Gilani, Pakistan’s PM, has demanded that the US government give them the same kind of help.

Gilani met with George W. Bush this week and has made it clear that Pakistan should receive the same treatment as India.

“There should be no preferential, there should be no discrimination. And if they want to give civilian nuclear status to India, we would also expect the same for Pakistan too,” Gilani said at a press conference in Washington.

Now that sounds sensible, but the real question is: Hasn’t Pakistan already received a preferential treatment form the US since the 9/11 attacks in 2001 for its contribution to the fight on terror?

Pakistan has received more than $9bn from the US for it’s contribution in the “war on terror”, in spite of the very poor results and growing terrorist activity on the boarder with Afghanistan, which has been blamed on Pakistan’s military.

The recent terrorist attack against the Indian embassy in Kabul has been blamed on Pakistan by several high-level American security sources.

A New York Times report reveals today that top US officials have secretly travelled to Pakistan this month to confront the country’s “most senior officials with new information about ties between the country’s powerful spy service and militants operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas, according to American military and intelligence officials.”

“The CIA emissary presented evidence showing that members of the spy service had deepened their ties with some militant groups that were responsible for a surge of violence in Afghanistan, possibly including the suicide bombing this month of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, the officials said.”

“The CIA assessment specifically points to links between members of the spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, and the militant network led by Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, which American officials believe maintains close ties to senior figures of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas,” according to the NY Times.

So on the back of this, is Gilani right to say that the US should not give India a preferential treatment?

Let us know what you think.