US considers safeguards on aid to Pakistan's tribal areas

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States may build safeguards to ensure that aid poured into Pakistan's tribal areas, where Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants were believed hiding, does not fall into wrong hands, officials said.

The administration of President George W. Bush reportedly plans to pour 750 million dollars worth of aid to the federally administered tribal areas, as the Pakistan region is formally called, in a bid to wrest it away from militants.

The New York Times, citing unnamed officials involved in the planning, highlighted on Monday the dangers of distributing so much money in an area where oversight is impossible.

Who will be given the aid has quickly become one of the most contentious questions between local officials and US planners concerned that millions might fall into the wrong hands, the report said.

But US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said everyone was well aware that the tribal region bordering Afghanistan was "a difficult operating environment."

"Whenever you build up aid programs in these kinds of regions, you take that into account and you work to try to build in the kind of safeguards to make sure that the money is being well spent," he told reporters.

A draft of the aid plan warns that the "severe governance deficiencies" in Pakistan's tribal areas will make it virtually impossible for the aid to be sustainable or to overcome the area's "chronic underdevelopment and consequent volatility," the New York Times said.

McCormack said that building up an infrastructure for funneling aid in the tribal areas, virtually cut off from the rest of the world for a long time, could not be done overnight.

"It takes time," he said. "So you have to be smart about it, you have to be smart about the way you spend your money. And we are trying to do that," he said.

The aid plan was reportedly highlighted in a June visit to Pakistan by Richard Boucher, the US assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, as a measure of Washington's support for Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.

Boucher told a Congressional hearing last week that the Pakistani government was committed to improving living conditions and expanding governance in the tribal areas and that Washington had requested additional funds in the fiscal year 2008 budget to assist Islamabad "in this crucial endeavor."

"Of course, we are under no illusions about the difficulties faced by the government of Pakistan in extending its writ into these territories or about al-Qaeda and Taliban activities in this area, and the level of commitment required to prevent them from finding safe-haven there," he said.