Saudi aid priorities
====================

Asked about the role of Pakistan in the Saudi story, John Kiriakou first said he could not confirm the specific allegation put to him, he did not know whether it was true, but he had heard it for the last twenty or twenty-two years, and it rang true to him.  Then he added something he thought many people do not understand.

A deep affection with a shape

There is a very deep love between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, he says, to the point where the city where Abu Zubaydah was captured, Faisalabad, was named after King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, because he had given so much money to Pakistan to develop it.  

So Pakistanis have this deep love of Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis are very generous. But, Kiriakou says, they are generous many times in the wrong areas: instead of building schools they build mosques; instead of building hospitals they send planeloads of Qurans; and instead of building water treatment plants or power plants they send money for weapons and ammunition and training in various camps. 

The conclusion he draws

This, he says, is really a problem for the United States, which has allowed itself to believe over many years that the Saudis are its friends. They are not our friends, he says; they're our enemies, and it was always his view that they should be treated as enemies. 

The misdirection has a mirror in his account of American programmes in Yemen, where he argues the reverse case: that the way to defeat militancy is patient infrastructure of the kind described in the Sanaa sewer project, not projects like the Yemen jazz radio plan. His view of why the Saudi state behaved as it did before the attacks is set out in the Saudi fear of an election.

Money as a veto on change

The same spending pattern appears in Kiriakou's 2015 account as an obstacle to political change rather than merely as misdirected charity. Anybody participating in a popular uprising anywhere in the region, he said, is going to have to fight against Saudi money and Saudi weapons, a claim he illustrated with Egypt, where he described Riyadh as bankrolling the government and ensuring its survival.

See also

- The Saudi fear of an election
- Saudi princes and 9/11
- Faisalabad
- ISI
- The Sanaa sewer project
- Economic roots of terrorism
- Foreign aid
