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APBy NAHAL TOOSI
ISLAMABAD (AP) — A top U.S. senator on Tuesday urged Pakistan to "ratchet up" its sense of urgency in battling the spreading militancy in its northwest, even as the government defended a deal to impose Islamic law in a swath of the region to achieve peace with the Taliban. John Kerry expressed reservations about the peace pact in the Swat Valley, hours after a hard-line cleric who mediated the deal indicated it will protect militants accused of brutal killings from prosecution.
Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is spearheading a bill to increase nonmilitary aid to Pakistan, a multibillion dollar effort to strengthen sectors such as the economy and education in part to lessen the allure of extremism in the impoverished Muslim-majority nation of 170 million.
The senator told reporters in Islamabad that the Pakistani government had to make some "basic decisions," including where and how much of its army it will deploy against al-Qaida and Taliban fighters, who are primarily based along its northwest border with Afghanistan.
The army has tens of thousands of troops in the northwest, but has long devoted far more resources to its eastern border with longtime rival India.
"I don't think that the effort has been resourced the way that it needs to be either in the personnel or the strategy," Kerry said, adding later, "The government has to ratchet up the urgency."
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Kerry on the Swat Valley deal later in the article: "I've expressed concerns and others have expressed concerns about this agreement," Kerry said, noting past peace deals with militants have tended to unravel. "I have, personally, serious reservations about whether or not it will hold."
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US to make Pakistan pledge but backs stringsWASHINGTON (AFP) — The United States said Tuesday it planned an aid pledge to Pakistan at this week's conference in Tokyo but rejected Islamabad's pleas that its assistance come without conditions. "We'll be making a pledge," State Department spokesman Robert Wood told reporters. He declined to give details ahead of Friday's conference in the Japanese capital.
US President Barack Obama, vowing a new focus on rooting out extremism from Pakistan, has already thrown his support behind a bill in Congress to triple non-military assistance to Pakistan to 1.5 billion dollars a year.
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on Monday warned a key sponsor of the bill, US Senator John Kerry, that setting conditions to the aid would "fail to generate the desired goodwill and results."
But Wood said the United States would go ahead and establish "benchmarks" for progress:
"We want to see certain standards and goals met," he said. "I think you would expect when the US taxpayer is providing money, assistance to a country, that we want to make sure that we're not only getting our money's worth but that certain things that we care about we want to see that they be dealt with," he said.
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