WASHINGTON, Jan 16: US Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton has said that President-elect Barack Obama supports a proposed $15 billion aid package for Pakistan.

During her confirmation hearing before a Senate panel, Senator Clinton outlined a policy that realises the limitation of US military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan and stresses the need to focus on economic and political engagement with the two nations.

Unlike the outgoing Bush administration, Senator Clinton showed a better understanding of the region’s history and admitted that the history has not favoured military expeditions in that region.

“My awareness of the history going back to Alexander the Great and certainly the imperial British military; and Rudyard Kipling’s memorial poems about Afghanistan; the Soviet Union, which put in more troops than we’re thinking about putting in,” she said.

“I mean, it calls for a large dose of humility about what it is we are trying to accomplish.”

It was in this context that Senator Clinton referred to a piece of legislation, approved by a key committee of the previous Congress but now needs to be reintroduced in the present Congress.

“The president-elect does support the legislation that you were part of and Vice-President-elect Biden, and I think Senator Lugar was as well,” said Mrs Clinton while referring to the Biden-Lugar bill that proposes a 10-year, $15 billion aid package for Pakistan.

But Senator Clinton emphasised that the Obama administration would want to separate US military aid from non-military aid to Pakistan.

“The tripling of the non-military aid is intended to provide resources that will both support the Pakistani people, but also give some tools to the democratically elected government to try to start producing results for the people of Pakistan,” she said.

“The military aid -- we want to really look hard at seeing whether we can condition some of that on the commitment for the counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism missions.”

Pakistan was one of the key areas that dominated the discussion in the two-session confirmation hearing at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Senator Robert Casey, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, noted that the current situation in Pakistan presented a challenge not only to the American people but also to the world and wanted to know how the Obama administration would approach this problem.

“Pakistan has a particular complexity because of its nuclear weapons capacity,” Senator Clinton acknowledged. “It has many dimensions to it -- the relationship with India, the relationship with Afghanistan, the role that Iran and others are playing in that region.”

The United States, she said, needed to approach this with the same level of attention and comprehensive understanding that the American military was attempting to do in Afghanistan.

Senator Clinton also emphasised the need to work more closely with the government of Pakistan to protect them from violent extremists as well as to root out Al Qaeda and other remnants of the terrorist networks so that they don’t find save haven in Pakistan to plan attacks against the United States or any other country.

Mrs Clinton also noted that the elected government in Pakistan had been “saying a lot of the right things” with respect to the threat posed by the extremists and terrorists, particularly along the border and in Fata.

Senator John F. Kerry, the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also a Democrat, agreed with Mrs Clinton’s assessment that “the complications are profound in both Pakistan and Afghanistan” and added that there also major differences between India and Pakistan.

“That is the centre of the war,” he added.

Senator Kerry recalled that during his recent trip to the region, one person defined “Pakistan as a government without a country and Afghanistan as a country without a government.”

The senator also acknowledged that there were ‘inherent contradictions’ in the structure that the US had been trying to ‘impose’ in Afghanistan.

Senator Kerry stressed the need to respect tribal customs and traditions and wondered if US air strikes in Fata were achieving the targets they were trying to achieve.

“There has been a considerable blowback, and I think counter -productivity, in the collateral damage that has been occurring there,” he noted.

“And I hope that you would also agree to really dig into that and take a look at whether or not all of that targeting is in fact as purported to be and as important as is suggested. Because I think we’re creating some terrorists and losing some ground in the effort to win hearts and minds.”