K-L Bill

There is no doubt that every loan, all aid, and every financial commitment has some strings attached. No bank would lend money without certain conditions. So in a way the US has every right to attach some conditions to the bill. As a recipient country Pakistan will have to comply with the conditions. So there is no point in saying that the conditions are only binding on the US admin and Pakistan can go on its own merry way.
In principle, I agree with most of the known conditions. We don’t know if there are any unknown or hidden conditions that have caused so much consternation in the army. The other issue is that if these conditions apply only to the military aid then why are they tied with the civilian aid? Pakistan military had, in the past, on many occasions accepted conditional aid and since the conditions were not made public, the army had no problem with them.
Now we are dealing with the two issues here: why the US made such a huge diplomatic faux pas by making the conditions public, and secondly, has the Zardari admin again failed to correctly gauge the public and Army’s growing nationalism? Actually the hyper nationalism falsely channeled as Anti Americanism by the Pakistani media.

I think Zardari and his friends in the US are simply looking to provoke the army because they feel that they are secure due to the Obama Admin support.

How accurate is the assumption that the US would not allow the army to act against the civilians? I am not too sure about that. The Army can manage to sideline Zardari and his group with another set of civilians without flipping the cart upside down.
In my opinion, the path the Obama Admin and Zardari have chosen to confront the army is full of land-mines and in the end would actually hurt the civilian establishment.

Pakistan army’s connections with the Pentagon are well known and the army Generals issued statement only after meeting General McChrystal. Coincidently, McChrystal is a linchpin in another power struggle within the US establishment.

If Zardari really wants to confront the army, he has to appeal to the public and show his sincerity. Right now the hypothesis is that he is only fighting to keep his own and his party position and has no interest in continuing efforts to strengthen democracy in the country. That leaves him in a big hole and I think this current situation shows he is also under some false assumptions. This would actually cause many problems for the already fledgling efforts to restrict the army interference in the Pakistani affairs.
A bad and poorly thought out step and strategy by Zardari and his friends in the US who are clueless when it comes to dealing with the Pak army.