An awesome plan for Pakistan… and a pony!

Those of you who have been reading blogs for a while may remember a fun blogosphere game that dates back to this seminal 2004 post by Belle Waring. Belle explained it thusly at the time:

You see, wishes are totally free. It’s like when you can’t decide whether to daydream about being a famous Hollywood star or having amazing magical powers. Why not — be a famous Hollywood star with amazing magical powers! Along these lines, [my husband] John has developed an infallible way to improve any public policy wishes. You just wish for the thing, plus, wish that everyone would have their own pony!

ALEX WONG/Getty Images News

I was reminded of the pony game when reading this gloss of Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden’s plan for Pakistan:

The four part plan he laid out included large, unconditional financial support for non-security projects such as schools, roads, clinics, etc; conditioning of security aid on performance; support for judicial, political, and good government reforms; and finally an increase in public diplomacy and high impact support.

… and a pony! See how it works?

None of this is going to happen, as advisable as it might be. As Spencer Ackerman explained recently:

[A] considerable amount of the money the U.S. gives to Pakistan is administered not through U.S. agencies or joint U.S.-Pakistani programs. Instead, the U.S. gives Musharraf’s government about $200 million annually and his military $100 million monthly in the form of direct cash transfers. Once that money leaves the U.S. Treasury, Musharraf can do with it whatever he wants. He needs only promise in a secret annual meeting that he’ll use it to invest in the Pakistani people. And whatever happens as the result of Rice’s review, few Pakistan watchers expect the cash transfers to end.

Read more in this excellent CSIS report (pdf) on the subject.

Senator Biden is the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and has therefore had a say in how the bilateral relationship with Pakistan works. He has the power to lobby for changes, hold hearings, and can hold up other legislation if he doesn’t get his way. And yet he couldn’t even manage to get a Senate resolution on Pakistan that he cosponsored back in March out of his own committee. Perhaps there is some reasonable explanation for this, but it doesn’t inspire confidence that Biden would be able to do much more as a sitting president.

I hate to pick on Biden, who generally has the right instincts on Pakistan. And he’s hardly the only politician out there peddling pie-in-the-sky ideas. But the truth is, there’s no natural constituency in Congress for funding another country’s education system. Underwriting purchases of U.S. military hardware or funding for U.S. contractors to build roads abroad? No problem. But telling your constituents that you want to spend their hard-earned tax dollars to build a bunch of schools in the tribal badlands of Pakistan doesn’t exactly turn out votes.

Note: I originally attributed the Biden paraphrase to Steve Clemons. It was actually written by his coblogger, Sameer Lalwani.