WASHINGTON: The US budget for 2015 focuses on developing a relationship with Pakistan’s new civilian government to lay the groundwork for stability and growth, says the US State Department.

The budget proposals, announced on Tuesday, seek a billion dollars for Pakistan but a senior State Department official indicated that the Obama administration also intended to use a contingency fund for supplementing its funds for Islamabad.

Briefing the media on the 2015 budget proposals, Deputy Secretary of State Heather Higginbottom noted that $5.9 billion requested for Overseas Contingency Operations would fund key programmes in Pakistan and Iraq and help sustain US gains in Afghanistan through the 2014 transition.

“OCO remains an essential tool for funding extraordinary activities that are critical to our immediate national security objectives without undermining our longer term diplomatic and development efforts,” the deputy secretary said.Separately, the State Department also released a document highlighting its own budget proposals and those of the US Agency for International Development.

The documents points out that a total of $3.6 billion requested for the

Pak-Afghan region aims at protecting US “national security interests and sustains important investments in the stability, security, and development of Afghanistan and Pakistan”.

The budget “focuses on developing our relationship with Pakistan’s new civilian government to lay the groundwork for stability and growth”.