Federal Finance Minister Hafeez Sheikh has rejected the impression that the USA is giving tens of billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan, describing it as a 'myth in his address to the Woodrow Wilson Centre Policy think-tank on Tuesday on the subject of 'Pakistani-US Economic Relations. Dr Sheikh told his audience that the truth was that in the Kerry-Lugar-Berman arrangement Pakistan had not even received $300 million. He was referring to the common cry going around Washington during the Raymond Davis affair that Pakistans aid should be cut off in exchange for Davis, the CIA contractor arrested after he had killed two young men this January. Dr Sheikhs statement uncovered a number of inconvenient truths. First, it revealed that the regime followed the American diktat not because of some financial compulsion, but because it wanted American support to remain in office. It also showed that the USA did not give aid directly, but channelled it through the international financial institutions that Dr Sheikh had not been able to persuade to lend to Pakistan because it was not obedient enough to the USA. It also illustrated how the USA was fighting its so-called war on terror on the cheap, using poor countries like Pakistan to make the actual payments while it dictated how the fighting was to be done. In view of this, the logical step is for Pakistan to repudiate its role, for which it is not even getting paid, and stop its support to the war. It should realize that the war cannot be fought without it, no matter who is footing the bill, and it has no reasons to further impoverish itself by making the actual payments, against promises for the future. Even the Kerry-Lugar-Berman aid, of which so much was made by both governments, has not actually materialised. The USA should not think it can carry out its foreign policy entirely in its own interest, with poor countries footing the bill, as Pakistan is doing.