Texas Republican Rep. Ted Poe has proposed a bill that would take away Pakistan’s status as a major non-NATO ally, or MNNA. The move comes amid multiple reports the Trump administration will press Islamabad to crack down on Pakistan-based militants like the Haqqani network, which launched attacks in Afghanistan.

“Pakistan must be held accountable for the American blood on its hands,” Poe said while introducing the bill on Thursday. “For years, Pakistan has acted as a Benedict Arnold ally of the United States. From harboring Osama bin Laden to backing the Taliban, Pakistan has stubbornly refused to go after, in any meaningful way, terrorists that actively seek to harm opposing ideologies.”

Poe said the U.S. must make a clean break with Pakistan or at least stop providing it with sophisticated weaponry and treating it like a close ally.

Poe chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade Subcommittee, and he has offered similar legislation several times over several years. This bill, co-sponsored with Rep. Rick Nolan, D-Minn., is more likely to make a statement than to become reality, and it faces a long legislative road if the administration doesn’t beat it to the punch.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has hinted the U.S. strategy review for Afghanistan due in mid-July will include a shift on Pakistan. He told Congress last week the strategy would be included in “a regional approach.”

But Pakistan’s embassy in Washington warned against “scapegoating” to explain the stalemate in Afghanistan, pointing instead to Afghanistan’s own troubled internal dynamics.

“Singling out Pakistan and pinning the entire blame on Pakistan for the situation in Afghanistan is neither fair nor accurate, nor is it borne out by the ground realities,” said Abid Saeed, press minister at the embassy, told Reuters. 

In 2004, President George W. Bush granted Pakistan MNNA status in an effort to get Pakistan to help the United States fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

That status makes it eligible for priority delivery of defense material, an expedited arms sale process and a U.S. loan guarantee program that backs up loans issued by private banks to finance arms exports. It can also stockpile U.S. military hardware, participate in defense research and development programs and be sold more sophisticated weaponry.

Pakistan has since become one of the leading recipients of U.S. foreign assistance, as Congress appropriated more than $18 billion in aid between 2002 and 2015, including $7.6 billion in security-related aid.

According to data compiled by the Center for International Policy, Congress was notified in 2014 of more than $600 million in major arms sales to Pakistan, including $200 million in Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles and GRC43M cutters worth $350 million. In 2015, there was nearly $1 billion in U.S. sales to Pakistan, including Viper attack helicopters and Hellfire missiles. The U.S. subsidized some of this under foreign military financing funds.

The powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., was instrumental in blocking U.S. subsidies for the $700 million sale of eight F-16 Block 52 fighter jets to Pakistan in 2016. He also fended off efforts to scuttle the sale completely.

Corker, on Wednesday, declined to comment on the idea of changing Pakistan’s status but said he hoped the Trump administration would take a tougher stand toward Pakistan over its alleged support of the Haqqani network.

“We have spent billion and billions and billions of tax-payer dollars toward their country, and I’m certainly unsatisfied,” Corker said. “The No. 1 threat to American soldiers is the Haqqani network, and Pakistan allows it to have safe haven in their country.” 

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White House officials say they plan to increase the base defense budget by $54 billion to $603 billion by slashing domestic spending and foreign aid. That netted a swift rebuke from House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, and his Senate counterpart, Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who have each proposed a $640 billion base budget and argue this is a meager $18 billion more than President Obama had planned.

McCain, in a statement, said the figure was, “a mere 3 percent above President Obama’s defense budget, which has left our military underfunded, undersized, and unready to confront threats to our national security… With a world on fire, America cannot secure peace through strength with just 3 percent more than President Obama’s budget. We can and must do better.”

The comments came as White House budget director Mick Mulvaney told reporters Monday the budget blueprint represents President Trump’s priorities, including the military, the nuclear arsenal and border security  –  without adding to the 2018 deficit. The non-defense side of the budget will be $462 billion, Mulvaney said. 

“We are taking his words and turning them into policies and dollars,” he said. “It reduces money to other nations, eliminates duplicative programs and eliminates programs that just don’t work.”

Asked how the defense top-line would carry forward Trump’s pledge to rebuild the military, Mulvaney said it was too soon to say. The Defense Department would over the next two weeks craft its budget to the top-line provided by the White House. The White House will issue a fuller budget proposal in early May.

Big questions about the plan remain, including whether that defense money would be just for the Pentagon or for broader defense programs such as the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration; whether foreign aid and security assistance programs from the Department of State could be shifted over to DoD; or whether the money will flow into the Pentagon’s base budget or the Overseas Contingency Operations fund.

The biggest question of all — how a proposal that guts the non-defense budget would survive on Capitol Hill — suggests the White House has offered an opening negotiation position rather than a viable number. It’s a proposal sure to net a violent reaction from Senate Democrats, who have in recent years asked that defense increases be matched dollar-for-dollar on the non-defense side.

Democrats quickly signaled Monday they would oppose the plan. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement, “This budget proposal is a reflection of exactly who this president is and what today’s Republican Party believes in: helping the wealthy and special interests while putting further burdens on the middle class and those struggling to get there.”

Squeezing Trump and Mulvaney from the opposite side of the aisle, in the lower chamber, Thornberry said, “we can and should do more” for defense.

“While we cannot repair all of the damage done by those cuts in a single year, we can and should do more than this level of funding will allow,” Thornberry said in a statement. “The administration will have to make clear which problems facing our military they are choosing not to fix. We cannot make repairing and rebuilding our military conditional on fixing our budget problems or on cutting other spending.”

Katherine Blakeley, a defense budget expert with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, says a number of questions need to be addressed before the real details of the budget plan can be assessed. But one thing is clear, she said – that this plan is designed to be “politically untenable for the Democrats while trying to be as favorable as possible for the Republicans.”

Or as Benjamin Friedman of the CATO Institute put it, “This plan won’t happen because Democrats will block it.”

Since the imposition of the budget caps, Democrats have fought to maintain a one-for-one trade between defense spending and domestic spending. That was easier when they had top cover from President Barack Obama, but could prove more challenging with the Trump White House hammering Democrats for holding down on defense levels.

Congress would not only need to pass a 2018 budget resolution, which could pass with Republican alone, but a new law to raise the caps to allow the White House’s proposal. That would require Democratic votes.

“Republicans need 60 Senate votes to overturn the BCA cap for next year,” Friedman said. “I believe Schumer can keep enough of Democrats in line around the idea that an increase in defense must be matched by an increase in non-defense discretionary to stop this.”

Instead, he predicts the two parties will settle on a raising of the budget caps for both defense and non-defense spending, with an influx of cash into OCO.

Blakeley also notes that, by putting its marker for fiscal 2018 down now, the administration is setting up the still-unsettled fiscal 2017 appropriations discussion as a proxy war. The government is currently operating under a continuing resolution to fund the federal government, which expires at the end of April. 

Mackenzie Eaglen, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said of Democrats, “This will really irk them and there’s no reason for them not to go all in on this political battle. Cutting programs like Head Start and National Endowment for the Arts are not even popular among many Republicans.”

Because the plans pays for defense increases through the non-defense side and not deficit spending, the proposal is a nod at fiscal conservatives in Congress. Mulvaney was one of them before he left Congress to join the White House.

“Nobody wants to increase overall spending, and the only way you can do that without huge earth-shaking debates is by reducing other discretionary spending,” said James Jay Carafano, a national security expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “There is a rational limit to how much you can do that.”

It is also a nod toward defense hawks. Carafano described the White House’s number Monday as a “down payment” on the defense build-up Trump has repeatedly promised.

“The important thing to me is this is a clear statement of recognition that we are heading towards a hollow force,” Carafano said. “There’s not just a readiness crisis, there’s enormous modernization challenges, and you have trouble maintaining [operational] tempo. That’s the text book definition of a force that’s heading to hollow.”

The board, a DoD advisory committee comprised of private-sector executives, says the role should focus more on reining in overhead and less on substituting for the defense secretary. The board made the recommendation in a recent, 112-page report on the presidential transition, which comes as Congress and the Pentagon are pursuing their own agendas for DoD reform.

“In the past, it has been quite normal for the Deputy to spend significant time away from the Pentagon, either ‘filling in’ for the Secretary or on matters requiring coordination with other agencies, international partners, or the White House,” DBB chair Michael Bayer said in a letter accompanying the report. “The adverse consequence of this has been an insufficient attention to the important primary function of managing the Department. The management challenges of this, the largest institution on the planet, require the full-time attention of a Chief Management Officer.”

The Defense Department is the nation’s largest enterprise, and if its expenditures were gross national product it would be the seventeenth largest nation, the report notes. It is the nation’s largest employer, with more than 1.3 million people on active duty, more than 700,000 civilian personnel and roughly 600,000 contractors. Another 1.1 million serve in the National Guard and Reserve forces, and about 2 million military retirees and their family members receive earned benefits.

The current deputy defense secretary, Bob Work, has championed a vision for a Defense Department that is more technologically agile and globally engaged, and spearheaded its so-called “Third Offset Strategy.” Work also has called for cost cutting, and, pointing to estimates that the department has 22 percent more in installations and real estate than it needs, urged lawmakers to consider a new round of the politically unpopular base-closure process.

As envisioned by the advisory board, the deputy defense secretary would take bold action to tame the costs associated with overhead, personnel, benefits and unnecessary work, all of which Bayer considers necessary for DoD to “swiftly and shrewdly adapt to maintain its superiority over determined adversaries.”

“Without major surgery, our overhead and personnel costs will continue to eat away at our modernization and readiness,” Bayer’s letter reads. “This is not about policy; it is about running the Department like a modern business.”

The report argues DoD must look closely at off-limits budget areas like intelligence, classified programs and their overhead, the combatant commands and the armed services, and bring in specialized expertise to lead a re-structuring review of the Pentagon. This would ultimately cut entire organizations, activities and contracts, as opposed to picking around the edges of the budget.

Email:  jgould@defensenews.com 

Twitter:  @ReporterJoe