Pakistan should heed US concerns: Key US senator

Car Levin said he wanted to maintain good ties with Islamabad "but not at any price."

WASHINGTON: Pakistan must heed US "concerns" about its efforts to combat extremists, a senior US senator said Tuesday, warning he wanted to maintain good ties with Islamabad "but not at any price."

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin became the second senior US lawmaker in two days to express deep misgivings about relations with Pakistan amid ties strained after the US raid that killed Obama bin Laden just outside the capital Islamabad.

"I think it's important that we have a good relationship with Pakistan, but not at any price," Levin, a Democrat, said amid anger in Washington that bin Laden lived unperturbed for years a stone's throw from a Pakistani military academy.

Levin said Islamabad should give US interrogators access to three of the al Qaeda leader's widows who lived with him at the fortified compound in Abbottabad where elite US commandos shot the terror mastermind dead on May 2.

"That would show that they're trying to be responsive to our concerns. They ought to respond to our concerns," said the senator, who cautioned that cooperation against extremists "should not be dependent upon certain moods of either party."

The United States is keen to question the three women in hopes of finding out more details of al Qaeda's reach and organisation, as well as details of bin Laden's final years.

President Barack Obama's administration, which is sifting through a trove of data seized from bin Laden's compound, insisted it was making "progress" in obtaining more information from Islamabad, but Pakistan said it had received no formal request for access to the women.

Levin said Washington should formally object to Pakistan leaking the name of the CIA station chief in Islamabad "if they leaked it," but acknowledged that this would be unlikely to have much force amid anti-US anger there. "They're trying to show that they're not responding affirmatively to too many things we're asking for these days," he told reporters, amid calls from US lawmakers to curtail US aid to Pakistan.

But in a sign of how little leverage that could provide, a key author of a major foreign assistance bill for Pakistan complained that very little of that money had been spent. "We've spent only $179 million out of the $1.5 billion," said Republican Senator Richard Lugar, who cited "lack of confidence and anybody administering (the aid) or even disagreement on what we should be spending it for."

A February 2011 US Government Accountability Office report found that, as of December 31, 2010, just $179.5 million out of the roughly $1.5 billion in annual aid had been spent on seven programs.