March PF Topic

Resolved: The U.S. should suspend all assistance to Pakistan.

The BBC website has a great timeline of events showing the various flashpoints of tension between the U.S. and Pakistan over the past year, starting with the Raymond Davis case and culminating with NATO bombing raid that ended 2011.  It's also important to note that recently wikipedia released Stratfor documents suggest that Pakistani intelligence officials were aware of Osama bin Laden's presence in Pakistan up until the time of his death.

What "assistance" are we giving them?
Here are a couple of articles that breakdown what the U.S. has given to Pakistan over the past decade:
http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2011/05/11/did-pakistan/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jul/11/us-aid-to-pakistan

Why would we "suspend" our assistance?
There are some very practical reasons for withdrawing our support.  For practical reasons, we can easily point to our stagnant economy.  The U.S. has been taking stock of all of it's foreign expenditures and assessing whether or not they continue to offer unconditional assistance to struggling nations.  To a certain extent, practicality also dictates that it's foolish to offer aid to countries when they are unable or, as it appears in Pakistan's case, are unwilling to to return the favor.

Dealing with 'why' would we want to discontinue aiding Pakistan helps us get to what's at the heart of this debate which is why we should suspend assistance to Pakistan.  As debaters, we often equate should with a moral obligation; that seeing the word 'should' suddenly thrusts us into a debate about the morality of an issue.  There are some good reasons why we should withdraw our assistance to Pakistan.  Let's put these under the category of moral reasons.

The bulk of our aid is military aid.  While there is some humanitarian aid going to Pakistan, the resolution states "all assistance" would be stopped.  If we were to stop sending military aid to Pakistan, a couple of arguments exist on moral grounds.  1. Less military aid in an unstable government is a good thing.  You don't give weapons to societies when there is a high likelihood of those weapons winding up in the wrong hands and causing harm to innocent people.  2. By continuing to send humanitarian aid, we're just putting a band-aid on a bigger problem.  One way to think of it is to think of this in the context of someone with an addiction.  By giving aid to a country that ultimately won't benefit from it, nor will it fix the bigger problems there we aren't actually helping them, anymore than if you were to give some change to a vagrant on the street who was going to just spend it on alcohol, drugs, etc.  Your assistance only enables them to make it to another day; it's a short term solution.  For a better example of how problematic this is, see most countries in Africa.  3. One final reason that fits our moral framework is that suspending our aid at this juncture would be a punitive measure, as if to say, "Pakistan, you've been bad, therefore this is your punishment."  Foreign aid is often used as a foreign policy tool the same way parents use rewards and teachers use stickers.  However, in Pakistan's case they didn't track mud in the house or forget to turn in homework, they've been allowing terrorism to find sanctuary in their country.

When weighing the practicality vs. morality on Pro, I personally believe the practicality bears out.  It's easier to argue that it just doesn't make sense to keep sending assistance to Pakistan.  It defies logic and reasoning to continue doing so, etc.

Hopefully, I've given you a place to start for Pro.  Now let's move on to Con using the same framework of practicality vs. morality.


Why we should not suspend our assistance (protecting the status quo)
Instead of calling it practical, I'm going to borrow an LD term and call it Utilitarian. For starters, I want to point out the effectiveness of cutting a nation off.  In 1962 the U.S. imposed a trade embargo on Cuba, in the hopes that the loss of U.S. business would cause the newly Communist island nation to collapse.  It's been 50 years.  No change. The UN began imposing sanctions on Iraq in 1990 and continued off and on up until the U.S. invaded the country in 2003.  Lots of Iraqis starved during the sanctions, but the government wasn't toppled.  The U.N. has leveled sanctions against Iran since 2006 regarding their nuclear program.  This has only emboldened the Iranians and their lunatic leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Basically if your point is to teach Pakistan a lesson, history shows us that suspending assistance is not the way to go about teaching it.

Another Utilitarian reason to keep our assistance flowing is that we need as many allies in the region as possible and giving aid gives us leverage in the relationship.  It sounds manipulative, but from a pragmatic view, we're better off with Pakistan being in our debt.  Remember the episode of The Office where Dwight decides to get everyone breakfast in return for them all 'owing him one'? (except Andy responds with a good deed and then he and Dwight continue to out-polite each other.  Those two!) 

Now for the moral reasons. Several religions, including Christianity, preach the principle of "turning the other cheek." Jesus Christ took the creed of "eye for an eye" and completely turned it around: "If someone strikes your right cheek, offer him your left one."  True, Pakistan has not been our strongest ally as of late, but that's no reason to punish them by cutting off our assistance to them.  There's also the idea that if our humanitarian aid reaches just one person, then it's worth it.  For as former Lanier debater, Kane Kenney, put it "It's good to be good."

Hopefully this is enough to get you started on some ideas for Pro and Con.  A well-balanced case on this topic will combine some factual evidence with some moral/practical evidence.  It's important to remind the judge/audience that we're talking about foreign policy and foreign policy can't just be about numbers and stats, it's about people.“Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood.”- Jimmy Carter