Islamabad, July 19: The US secretary of state Hillary Clinton announced more than $500 million in new aid projects for Pakistan on Monday, which Washington hopes will help win over a sceptical public in an ally vital to winning the war in neighbouring Afghanistan.
The Pakistan and Afghan commerce ministers signed a trade deal during her visit that the United States also hopes will help boost cooperation between the countries. For Pakistan, she announced a string of new projects, including dams, power generation, agricultural development and hospital construction, funded under US legislation passed in 2009 tripling civilian aid to $7.5 billion over the next five years. She said, “The action is better than the speech and we are acting”.
The projects, the first to be launched under a new aid plan, are seen as crucial to shoring up support for the US-led struggle against militants in a country where opinion polls show fewer than one in five view the United States favourably.
“The opinion about the United States in Pakistan will change when the people of Pakistan see how, through this partnership, their lives have changed,” said Pakistani foreign minister, Mr Shah Mehmood Qureshi.
He said the negotiations are in the interest of the two countries, adding trilateral relations and strengthening the ties between the two nations are mulled over in the dialogues. The next round of talks will take place in Washington in October, said the foreign minister. Earlier, during the talks, the US rolled out a series of development projects in energy, water, health and education under an “elevated and extended” US-Pakistan strategic dialogue. Ms Clinton mentioned the dialogue that covered 13 areas leading to a programme that now focuses on energy, water, health, education, information and even export of Pakistani mangoes to the US markets. Meanwhile, Mr Qureshi also said
that Pakistan is facing a heavy shortfall of energy.
However, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton on Monday said the world community has reservations about a Pakistan-China deal for the supply of nuclear reactors and wants Islamabad to respond to these concerns.
Ms Clinton made the remarks while responding to a question about concerns on the Pakistan-China nuclear deal