The International Monetary Fund, the global lender of last resort for national governments, will meet on Friday to consider a new $1.3 billion loan to Pakistan under its Resilience and Sustainability Facility. The loan would be the 25th that the IMF has provided Pakistan, and it follows a $1.3 billion loan for climate change in March and a $7 billion loan of which the IMF releases $1 billion annually.
Following last month’s Pahalgam massacre — Pakistan’s attempt to replicate via its terrorist proxies Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel — the United States, international community, and IMF should slam the door on any additional funding for Pakistan. It’s time for tough love.
According to Transparency International, Pakistan is among the world’s most corrupt countries. Rather than clean up its act, Pakistan has let its ranking drop consistently since 2018. When an alcoholic uses donations to buy hard liquor, the answer is not to up his allowance; rather, it is to cut him off. The IMF should do no less given how Pakistani authorities now look at international largesse as an entitlement to underwrite their corruption.
Pakistan spends billions of dollars on its terrorist infrastructure. In 2008, Pakistan-trained and sponsored groups attacked multiple sites around Mumbai, gunning down civilians and tourists, including Americans. To this day, Islamabad protects the masterminds of that attack. Nor have Pakistani authorities ever explained how it was the al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden came to be in Abbottabad, Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point, at a time he was wanted for the slaughter of thousands of Americans.
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence trained the Taliban, smuggled the precursors for improvised explosive devices, and helped plan and engineer the collapse of Afghanistan amid the American withdrawal. The blood of hundreds if not thousands of American servicemen is on the hands of the Taliban’s Pakistani handlers. Money is fungible, and ever dollar the IMF provides Pakistan is a dollar Pakistani authorities can divert to terror groups.
The United States is the largest contributor to the IMF, whose headquarters are in Washington, D.C. That U.S. role has led to Washington’s predominant influence across administrations and decades. IMF country officers and specialists speak about pressure within the organization to continue to approve grants, sometimes because their own jobs depend upon it and sometimes because they fear a country might collapse if it does not receive the financial lifeline. Of course, corrupt regimes take advantage of this dynamic, wasting and diverting money on the belief that IMF bureaucrats will bail them out no matter what the cost.
It is time to end this dynamic. Cutting off aid may precipitate a crisis in the short term, but it is the only way to get Pakistan to accept accountability in the long term. Nor does Islamabad actually need money: If it choose to cut off terror support or even dissolve the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, it could fund more essential services. Pakistani authorities might whine about ending their intelligence service, but the fact is that the ISI has cost the Pakistani people far more over the decades than its budget. Its investment in terrorism has made Pakistan a rogue nation, and its corruption has driven away foreign investors.
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For President Donald Trump to continue to allow billions of dollars in IMF grants and loans to a terror-sponsoring regime with the blood of Americans, Indians, and many others on its hands is perverse. Pakistan is laughing at Trump and playing both Washington and the IMF for fools.
For decades, American officials across administrations were predictable. American diplomats and IMF bureaucrats might as well be replaced with an algorithm. Trump has the power to stop that dynamic. Pakistan would be a good place to start. Frankly, such a decision could not come soon enough.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.