US pledges extra 1b dlrs to Afghanistan

On a one-day visit to the Afghan capital, Powell told reporters the new pledge would be made at an international donors' conference in Berlin late March.

"The United States will make another significant contribution at that conference, another billion dollars on top of the 1.2 billion dollars we have already committed," he said.

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"So this year it will be 2.2 billion dollars."

The extra billion was already approved by Congress in November as part of a wider budget appropriation bill, but Powell is the first to announce that it would be pledged during the March 31-April 1 Berlin conference.

Afghanistan's top donors Britain, Germany, Japan and the US are expected to pledge some nine billion dollars over the next four years at the conference, according to German newspaper reports.

Afghan Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani however complained in Tokyo last week that his country would need 27.5 billion dollars to rebuild over the next seven years and that previous pledges "vastly underestimated" its needs.

The 4.5 billion dollars in pledges Afghanistan received at the Tokyo donors' conference in January 2002 had failed to lift it out of poverty after the ouster of the extremist Islamic Taliban militia by US-led forces, he said.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell flew into the Afghan capital yesterday for talks with President Hamid Karzai, as US forces step up the hunt for Osama bin Laden in southeast Afghanistan and officials try to register voters in time for June polls.