In an interview with a US radio, the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that relationship with Pakistan is important with respect to our work in Afghanistan.
Hillary said it’s a difficult relationship. It has been for many, many years. You can go back and trace the difficulties that our country has encountered. We’ve gone through periods of closeness and periods of distance.
“And part of the reason we keep going back and working at it is because it’s a very important relationship, and it’s especially important with respect to our work in Afghanistan”.
She further said Pakistan is so poor and needs so much reform in their government and in the delivery of fundamental services that it is a – it’s a constant, vicious cycle of – if you can’t have a decent tax base so that you can actually have schools for universal education, then you’re going to have families desperate to get their sons educated, turning them over to madrassas that are going to inculcate them in extremism, and on and on and on.
“And so part of what we’ve tried to do with Pakistan, in the last three years, is provide support for them to make the tough decisions. They have to reform their agricultural sector, their energy sector. They’ve got to begin to wean their citizenry off of subsidies in order to generate some kind of competitive economic environment”
The US Secretary of State further said that the fact is that so few people pay taxes in Pakistan, and hardly anybody among the feudal landed elite and the rich pay taxes, so there’s no base on which to build the kind of system of services that people would at least feel like, well, maybe it hasn’t gotten to me yet, but my children’s life will be better.
She said Pakistan is facing turmoil, extremism all kinds of internal difficulties and it’s not only the political choices that are made, it’s the weak economic leadership that has gripped the country and, frankly, one of the problems throughout the world.
“An elite that is not willing to invest in the future prosperity and success of their country; in part, because they’re doing pretty well, they have for generations; in part, because they don’t see a connection between, if you grow the pie, you actually have a chance to do even better than if you shrink the pie and your piece is comparatively not growing. So it’s a troubling set of economic conditions, as well as political ones, that we’re trying to work with them on”, Clinton concluded.
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