Bush: Review mode

The review contains an array of options, including telling Pakistan’s military that billions of dollars in American aid will depend on the military’s being reconfigured to effectively fight militants. That proposal amounts to a tacit acknowledgment that roughly $10 billion in military aid provided to Pakistan as “reimbursements” for its efforts to root out militant groups has largely been wasted.

The payments have been the source of increasing criticism on Capitol Hill and from independent review groups, which have concluded that Pakistan diverted much of the money to build up its forces against India.

Revamping the aid to the military was part of a three-month study of what has gone wrong in the seven-year war along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The study calls for a new and broadly regional approach to insurgencies that move freely across the mountainous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In the short term, it calls for continued covert strikes into Pakistani territory from Afghanistan, though the American military has been reluctant to repeat the kind of ground attack that led to an open exchange of fire with Pakistani border forces in September.

The report, which is expected to be presented to Obama’s top national security advisers in the next week or two, was the product of a highly unusual strategy review that was begun in mid-September, just four months before President Bush leaves office.

“We’ve gone seven long years proclaiming that Pakistan was an ally and that it was doing everything we asked in the war on terror,” said one senior official involved in drafting the report. “And the truth is that $10 billion later, they still don’t have the basic capacity for counterinsurgency operations. What we are telling Obama and his people is that has to be reversed.”

The drafts prepared for the incoming Obama administration suggest that the US has never focused sufficiently on nation-building, jobs creation, construction of schools and roads, and, most important, pushing the Pakistani government to focus on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency.

The report includes options, not “recommendations,” so that Obama would not be put in the position of endorsing or rejecting Bush’s suggested policies.

It was completed just before the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last month, and the reaction to those events is likely to complicate some of the central options even before they are handed off to Obama.