A senior US senator said on Tuesday Pakistan should prove it is committed to fighting militancy before it receives more US aid and called the contribution by Nato allies to the war in Afghanistan pitiful. Senator Carl Levin, who chairs the US Senates armed services committee, said the United States should not rely on Pakistan for help in the Afghan war.
"I dont have a lot of confidence that the Pakistani government has the will or the capability to take on the violence," the Democrat told reporters in Washington. Levin spoke the day after guerrillas attacked a police academy in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore, killing eight cadets, in the latest sign of the rising threat of Islamist militancy in the nuclear-armed nation.
He said Pakistans government had not switched its security priorities from a potential external threat, posed by India, to the internal threat posed by the militants. Levins committee chairmanship and three decades as a senator give him considerable influence in Congress, which would have to approve an increase in aid to Pakistan.
He suggested more aid should flow only when Pakistan has demonstrated it wants to tackle militancy for the sake of its own security rather than due to pressure from Washington. "If I thought we could buy stability, I would buy it," he said. "But I dont think its effective unless the recipient of the support sees where the real threat is to them."
Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said aid could be effective if Pakistan had confidence that Washington was interested in a long-term partnership and the money could be tracked. "There needs to be an audit trail, an understanding of where its going and what its doing, and I think were all aboard for that," Mullen said at a meeting of defence chiefs from central and south Asia in Washington.
"The message thats important that Ive learned is... sending the signal were not going to leave them." US officials say militancy in Pakistan also threatens Afghanistan and the United States, as militants exploit safe havens in Pakistani border areas to launch raids into Afghanistan and plot attacks on targets further afield.
"Natos performance here is pitiful - its nothing short of pitiful," he said. "Natos got to understand this cannot just be an American and an Afghan deal, that theres got to be a major Nato component of it." Many Nato allies say they have already sent significant numbers of troops and have stressed that efforts to stabilise Afghanistan are about more than just military operations.
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