Trump’s threat

Pakistan doesn’t expect getting $700m Coalition Support Fund

By Mehtab Haider

ISLAMABAD: In the aftermath of US President Donald Trump’s threatening tone for voting at United Nations against shifting of its Embassy into Jerusalem, Pakistan’s economic managers do not expect reimbursement of $700 million indicated by Washington on account of Coalition Support Fund (CSF) during the current fiscal year.

Pakistan’s top economic managers confirmed to The News on Saturday that US had linked reimbursement of $700 million of CSF to Pakistan with the certificate going to be presented by Pentagon before the Congress that Islamabad was taking stern action against Haqqani network.

“Although, the IMF has inserted reimbursement of $700 million inflow in their projection of external inflows as we knew at our heart that it would be hard to receive this amount during the remaining period of the current fiscal year,” official sources said and added that now it had become impossible to get these inflows in the aftermath of threatening tone extended by US administration when Islamabad sternly opposed Washington’s move to vote against shifting of Embassy into Jerusalem and played key role in defining defeat at UN forum.

In the draft policy for making provision for reimbursement of indicated amount of $700 million, the Donald Trump administration had proposed taking actions against Jamat-Ud-Dawa by making its certification mandatory but finally this proposal was dropped and certification was restricted to only taking actions against Haqqani network.

For economic assistance and development projects, US has so far disbursed $25 million in first five months (July-Nov) period of the current fiscal year against total commitment of $117 million for 2017-18. US has disbursed $22 million in first four months of the current fiscal and provided only $3 million in November 2017.

The military assistance, the sources said, has not yet known that how much US had disbursed in the current fiscal year but it could be hardly in the range of same amount of few million dollars.

Since after becoming an ally of US in its war against terrorism during the Musharraf rule, Pakistan has received around $15 billion in shape of CSF from 2002 to 2017 but the country had borne losses of $123 billion on various accounts. So Islamabad has received peanuts compared to its losses. All loans and grants received from donors could hardly touch $67 billion since 2001 so the accumulated losses were almost doubled compared to these loans which had to repay by the country in many years to come.

However, the official sources reminded that US role was quite important in IMF as it could leverage its influence in case of securing bailout package from the Fund. Keeping in view the strained relations with US, Pakistan’s economic managers will have to perform well in order to avoid knocking at the door of the IMF otherwise Washington could use its influence for using it as arm twisting measures to pressurise Islamabad in months ahead. “We will have to put together our act in order to avoid going back to the IMF,” said the official.

Former Finance Minister Dr Hafeez Pasha has warned the economic managers that the country’s financing requirement would be standing at $32 billion over next 12 to 16 months and only two options existed either to go back to the IMF by facing conditions to slash down China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and other non economic conditions. The second option, he said, will be devising short, medium and long term plan to undertake reforms by evolving consensus among political parties on achieving goal of self reliance.