WASHINGTON, March 16: US Secretary of State Colin Powell has informed Congress that $395 million of financial assistance for Pakistan in 2004 will come from the Bush administration’s anti-terrorist budget.

He said the administration was seeking a total of $4.7 billion to help the countries that have joined the US-led war on terrorism.

The assistance for these countries, he said, would come from a much larger, $18.8 billion package the administration wanted to set aside for international assistance during the fiscal 2004.

“Our number one priority is to fight and win the ‘global war on terrorism.’ The budget furthers this goal by providing economic military and democracy assistance to key foreign partners and allies,” he said.

The proposed anti-terrorism budget seeks $657 million for Afghanistan, $460 million for Jordan, $395 million for Pakistan, $255 million for Turkey, $136 million for Indonesia, and $87 million for the Philippines.

Powell said Afghanistan would be one of America’s top priorities because Washington believed that to win the war on terror it was also necessary to help rebuild the countries destroyed by terrorists.

The United States is providing financial and logistic support to Afghanistan to help establish a national military and a national police force.

Both institutions were destroyed during the 20-year civil war and the country is now run by dozens of warlords with their own militias, who often do not follow the orders of the Kabul’s central government.

The US assistance, Powell said, would be used to “help establish security through a national military and national police force” and to “establish a broad-based and accountable governance through democratic institutions and an active civil society.”

The United States is also funding projects to rebuild Afghanistan’s road network, destroyed during the war.

“These funds will ensure a peace dividend for the Afghan people through economic reconstruction, and provide humanitarian assistance to sustain returning refugees and displaced persons,” said Powell.

“People often talk about how things are going in Afghanistan — Is it going well, is it not going well, or what? But when you look at what we’ve accomplished in less than a year and a half, it’s quite remarkable,” he said. “We’ve put in place a new government that is representative of its people. We’ve put in place a system where people are selecting their own leaders.”

The women of Afghanistan, he said, who were forced out of the national life by the former Taliban rulers were returning to the business place, the workplace, the educational system.

The economy, he said, was slowly getting restarted and this tremendous success was achieved with the assistance of the nations around the world.

Powell said one of the key indicators of “whether or not the glass is half full or the glass is half empty,” is the return of two million Afghan refugees from neighbouring Pakistan and Iran during the last year and a half.

“And no critic can take away from the simple fact that 2 million people have voted with their feet to return to this country that they had fled from over the last 15 or 20 years,” he added.