WASHINGTON (AFP) — The United States said Sunday it was reviewing its generous aid to Pakistan but appeared caught in a dilemma over the emergency rule imposed by the military ruler of its "war on terror" ally.
Influential senators from both the Democratic and Republican parties said Washington was paying the price for putting its alliance with President Pervez Musharraf above the democratic needs of the nuclear-armed nation.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the United States was going to "review aid" to Pakistan, which has received more than 10 billion dollars in US military assistance since the September 11 attacks of 2001.
But Rice, speaking in Jerusalem, seemed to temper that by noting the need to keep Pakistan on board the US struggle against Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
"We have a significant counter-terrorism effort in Pakistan and so we have to review this whole situation," she said, after the Pentagon ruled out any immediate cut to US military aid to Pakistan.
Musharraf's state of emergency declared Saturday, which amounted to a "second coup" according to opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, came despite weeks of US pressure including personal interventions from Rice.
Musharraf, switching to English during a televised address to the nation, reached out "to all my listeners in the United States" in invoking Abraham Lincoln's words at the height of the 1861-1865 Civil War, that preserving the US union took precedence over civil liberties.
"Poor president Lincoln, he must be turning in his grave," Bhutto, who hastily cut short a visit to Dubai to return home, said on ABC television.
The Pakistan People's Party leader said the United States, "the world's greatest democracy," should press Musharraf to abide by his promise to hold free and fair elections.
But Pakistan's government warned it could delay key elections that were due in January for a year, as police rounded up hundreds of opponents and held the country's sacked chief justice under house arrest.
Senator Joseph Biden, a long-shot Democratic hopeful in the 2008 White House race, said the Bush administration had only itself to blame.
"We have a huge stake, a huge stake, in seeing to it that the moderate majority in Pakistan have a political outlet," Biden, the chairman of the Senate's foreign relations committee, said on CBS television.
"This administration doesn't have a policy. It has a Musharraf policy, but it doesn't have a policy relative to Pakistan and how it has affected everything else in the region," he said.
Senior Republican Senator Arlen Specter said "it's hard to find a worse scenario than there is now" in Pakistan, accusing Musharraf of being too enfeebled to be a steadfast US ally in the war on terror.
"I wouldn't support Pakistan with US aid here," he told CNN. "He's doing everything which is against democracy. Seizing the Supreme Court is just outlandish. What he's done is declared himself the dictator."
In any case, analysts say, Washington has been short-changed by its support to Musharraf given that bin Laden remains at large and Al-Qaeda appears to be resurgent.
"For the US, it comes down to the 160 million people of Pakistan versus Musharraf," Syed Hasnat, a Pakistani scholar at Washington's Middle East Institute, told AFP.
"Dictatorship by itself generates extremist views in a society. And while Musharraf has presented himself as a savior for US interests, he's been unable to deliver all these years," he said.
But Teresita Schaffer at the Center for Strategic and International Studies said Washington's priority on tackling Al-Qaeda would trump its concern over democracy in Pakistan.
"It certainly will have to continue working with Pervez Musharraf on the key issues that have driven US policy over the past several years," she told NPR radio.
"The US doesn't have the luxury to say we don't care any more. But I think some of the warmth will have gone out of the relationship," Schaffer said.
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