[AdmSmith]

Are we providing him with a 20% boost of his economy? Then he should deliver something else than just words.

[Saberwielder]

Unfortunately this is one of those things where the administration feels that it's not as important as the tactical help we are getting from Pakistan on the anti-terror front on a day to day basis. Anit-terrorism should be our top priority but we cannot afford to totally ignore the madrassa situation.

Curiously, the fact is that we ourselves are not putting the money where our mouth is. Out of the $700 million annual aid we are giving to Pak, a mere $20 million is allocated for education assistance. But the flipside is that Pakistani education system is so f'd up that it cannot absorb multi-hundred million dollar aid annually.

If we are really serious, we should nudge Musharraf to allocate more to education, get help from Western NGOs and build quality secular public schools on a war footing and build up the absorptive capacity of the Pakistani education infrastructure. But unless Pakistan is wiling to take the leap, our money will end up going down the drain and that's part of the calculation where we are sending puny amounts there.