Jan
31
Should We Be Giving Aid to Pakistan?
Filed Under Mindful Ideas | 2 Comments
It’s ironic that as I write this, Pakistan is once again in the news as a hotspot of extremism and violence. I often select topics for this blog well ahead of time, and am sometimes writing about events that occurred several weeks ago. My original intent had been to discuss multiple articles expressing concern with Pakistan’s continuously inadequate response to the growing power of Islamic extremism within its borders, the tenuous relationship that our country shares with Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, and the rather glaring problem of Pakistan’s status as a nuclear power. Since then, however, presidential hopeful and advocate for democratic reform Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated, and Pakistan is in a state of chaos. The question of whether we should be giving aid to Pakistan is timelier than ever.
It is important to note that the term should carries a special connotation with regard to ethics and is more significant than the should that we use in everyday conversation. Ethically speaking, should is a reference to our moral responsibility. When asking the question of whether we should give aid to Pakistan, I am more specifically questioning whether we have a moral responsibility to do so.
This question requires that we first consider whether we should be giving foreign aid to anyone. There are several viewpoints that we ought to consider here, and we will focus on one prominent view for why we should give foreign aid, and one view of why we perhaps should not give foreign aid at all.
Opponents of the U.S.’s massive foreign aid spending focus on the lack of positive impact that such programs have wrought. We spend billions of dollars on foreign aid every year, mostly in the Third World, and it is difficult to cite even one nation that has noticeably improved itself, in terms of measurable qualities like increased standard of living or economic growth, as a direct result of foreign aid. Often, U.S. foreign aid is military in nature and not earmarked for uses that would benefit most citizens of recipient nations. Rather, U.S. foreign aid is predominantly part of a greater military and economic strategy.
In the case of Pakistan, for example, we provide a massive amount of military aid in the hope that Musharraf, a sympathetic ruler and one of the only barriers against an extremist Islamic takeover, can maintain control and be a long-standing ally in a highly volatile region. U.S. oil interests are paramount in this region, and if the oil suddenly dried up, our interest in giving Pakistan piles of U.S. tax dollars would largely disappear as well.
The argument here is that U.S. aid does not lead to good consequences, and is motivated by self-interest. These are important ethical concerns, as a consequentialist would likely have rule against continuing foreign aid programs. A Kantian, especially a strict Kantian who believes that self-interest cannot be the motivator of moral actions, would also have to vote down foreign aid programs, at least those that are clearly based solely on U.S. interests.
The advocate of foreign aid clearly has some work to do, but we shall do our best to help. One fairly compelling argument for the continuation of aid programs rests on the principle of justice, in one form or another. For our purposes, we will consider an argument that utilizes the concept of retributive justice. This is the form of justice that is best expressed in the maxim “an eye for an eye.” Retributive justice states that wrongs should be balanced by comparable punishments.
At an international level, the historical record strongly supports the claim that at least some of the prosperity of European nations and their North American descendants has been at the expense of their former colonies. Most of Africa and many parts of Asia were once highly profitable colonial outposts for Western Europe, while the exploitation of cheap Third World labor and less stringent environmental laws continues to benefit the massively successful American economy. We owe the Third World something, and foreign aid is the most direct and obvious means of repaying our debts.
This viewpoint has decidedly liberal foundations, and it assumes a certain interpretation of history, one that I think is mostly correct. Either way, historical interpretation has a significant role to play in our ability to support or oppose foreign aid programs. On one view, aid programs are ineffective and self-interested, therefore they ought to be done away with. On the other hand, foreign aid is a measurable way to right past injustices and seek a global balance.
I fear we have done little to answer the general question of whether we should give foreign aid at all, never mind the more specific question of providing aid to Pakistan. Both viewpoints considered thus far require empirical validation. We must investigate the claim that aid programs do not help and are self-interested, as well as the view that our prosperity has been at the expense of others. I will not attempt this here, but I will propose the possibility that in answering our questions, we must look not only at whether or not to provide aid, but in what form aid programs are most likely to be helpful. While military aid is guilty of the above charges, development aid, such as the transfer of efficient energy production technologies, seems a better candidate for success. The important thing is that we not only answer the question of whether we should help other nations be more prosperous, but also how we should go about such an endeavor.