U.S. senator doubts Pakistan, blasts "pitiful" NATO

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A senior U.S. senator said on Tuesday Pakistan should prove it is committed to fighting militancy before it receives more U.S. aid and called the contribution by NATO allies to the war in Afghanistan pitiful.

Senator Carl Levin, who chairs the U.S. Senate's armed services committee, said the United States should not rely on Pakistan for help in the Afghan war.

"I don't 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 Pakistan's government had not switched its security priorities from a potential external threat, posed by India, to the internal threat posed by the militants.

President Barack Obama announced on Friday a new U.S. strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, which included support for a proposal in the U.S. Congress to boost aid to Pakistan to $1.5 billion a year for five years.

Levin's 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 don't think it's effective unless the recipient of the support sees where the real threat is to them."

TOP OFFICER BACKS AID FOR PAKISTAN

Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the U.S. 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 it's going and what it's doing, and I think we're all aboard for that," Mullen said at a meeting of defense chiefs from central and south Asia in Washington.

"The message that's important that I've learned is... sending the signal we're not going to leave them."

U.S. 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.

In Afghanistan, the United States has some 38,000 troops alongside about 32,000 from allies, mainly NATO nations.

But Levin took aim at fellow NATO members for not sending more forces, imposing limits on how their troops can operate and not spending more money on Afghanistan.

"NATO's performance here is pitiful -- it's nothing short of pitiful," he said. "NATO's got to understand this cannot just be an American and an Afghan deal, that there's 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 stabilize Afghanistan are about more than just military operations.

(Additional reporting by David Morgan; Editing by David Storey)