David Cameron lover at Storbritannia skal gi 6,5 milliard kroner til Pakistans skolevesen over en fireårsperiode. Det er reaksjoner langt inn i hans eget parti.
Pakistan bruker 2 prosent av budsjettet på utdanning og 15 prosent på det militære. Det ligger i forhandlinger med Kina om kjøp av seks ubåter.
For ikke å snakke om all korrupsjonen.
På hjemmebane har den selvsamme statsminister kuttet 17.000 stillinger i det britiske forsvar. Alle departement har måttet blø, og ikke minst skattebetalerne. Investeringen i Pakistans skoler blir møtt med hoderysting også blant toryene.
Britain is cutting its defence budget by 8 per cent, cutting 17,000 military posts and scrapping warships and fighter jets.
By contrast, Islamabad is in talks with China to buy six submarines at a potential cost of more than £1?billion.
The Pakistani government may also spend another £1?billion on Chinese fighter aircraft.
Mr Cameron insisted that the support for education in Pakistan was in Britain’s long-term interests because illiteracy and poor schooling were a “root cause” of Islamic extremism and terrorism. But he conceded that the move would be controversial, and admitted that corruption and waste in Pakistan made it harder to justify British aid payments.
“The British people want to know every penny we do spend is going to the right places,” he said in a speech at a university in Islamabad.
“I need to convince them that it is. But my job is made more difficult when people in Britain look at Pakistan, a country that receives millions of pounds of our aid money, and see weakness in terms of government capacity and waste.” Mr Cameron said the answer was for Pakistan to tighten its tax code, ensuring more people paid more tax.
Many of Pakistan’s richest people “are getting away without paying much tax at all. That’s not fair,” he said.
Sikkerhets-dialog
Storbritannia vil sammen med USA finansiere et opplæringssenter for særlig begavede pakistanere, i spørsmål som gjelder militær høyteknologi. Men uttallige rapporter har vist at den pakistanske etterretningtjenesten ISI ikke er til å stole på. Man har ikke forlatt strategien om å bruke militante grupper som statens forlengede arm. Disse skal USA og GB dele militære hemmeligheter med.
As part of a new “security dialogue”, Mr Cameron announced that Britain would join the US in funding a Pakistan “centre of excellence” to develop bomb-disposal techniques.
That could mean sharing sensitive military secrets with the country’s intelligence agencies, which had been accused of supporting militant groups, including the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The Prime Minister insisted that helping Pakistan would make Britain safer.
“I would struggle to find a country that is more in our interests to see succeed than Pakistan,” he said.
“If we fail, we will have all the problems of migration, of extremism — problems that we don’t want to see.”
Mye tyder på at ekstremistproblemene vil fortsette så lenge regjeringen i landet ikke selv bestemmer seg for å ta skjeen i en annen hånd.
Britain triples aid for Pakistan’s schools
David Cameron has disclosed plans to almost triple British aid for schools in Pakistan, even as its government spent billions on military equipment.
