A senior Defense official said efforts to gain more accountability over Pakistan's spending began in earnest last year when officials from the Pentagon's comptroller's office made three trips to Islamabad for meetings with Pakistani finance officials.
In the meetings, each of which lasted several days, U.S. officials tried to get Pakistan to detail how Coalition Support Funds money had been spent. Afterward, Pakistani officials visited the Pentagon for similar talks.
The efforts fell short, however, as Pakistan resisted U.S. pressure to become more open. The Pakistanis chafed at demands to begin complying with more stringent accounting requirements than those already in use, the senior Defense official said.
The efforts were temporarily halted after Ryan C. Crocker, who was U.S. ambassador to Islamabad at the time, left to become Washington's envoy to Iraq. But Pentagon officials said they had since renewed talks with Pakistan in an attempt to revamp the program.
Part of the difficulty in achieving greater accountability and other reforms, Western observers say, is that the Pakistani military is hamstrung by its highly centralized bureaucracy.
One Western military official said it takes inordinate amounts of time to accomplish straightforward tasks such as scheduling meetings or conducting equipment inventories. He blamed the Pakistani military's "antiquated" and top-heavy command-and-control structure.
Exactly how the money from the Coalition Support Funds is distributed to the Pakistani military is still largely shrouded in secrecy. According to current and former Pentagon officials, Pakistan submits claims to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad for reimbursements for military operations against militant groups, as well as assistance to U.S. forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The claims are verified by the U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, before they are sent to the Pentagon comptroller's office for final vetting.
But the level of detail provided by the Pakistanis remains an issue of dispute within the Pentagon and among foreign aid experts tracking the program.
"I would have probably constructed this thing a little differently and done a lot of things differently," the senior military official said.
