Washington: The United States is trying to bring the Afghans and the Pakistanis together to work on security issues along their border amid reports that Pakistani intelligence services are again contributing to the rise of the Taliban. 

"This has been a continuing issue and certainly the Afghan government has some strong feelings about it," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters Thursday in response to a question about what US made of these reports.

"So what we have been trying to do we first and then NATO  is to bring the Afghans and the Pakistanis together to work on security issues along the border region," he said.

"The forces that threaten Afghanistan also could pose a potential threat to Pakistan as well, so there's a real mutual interest there. A stable Afghanistan, a stable, prosperous Afghanistan is in the interest of Pakistan as well as the rest of the region and vice versa," McCormack said.

Noting that there have been tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan on this issue, he said they have put in place at least the groundwork for better cooperation to get after that security issue along the border region, they need to build on that.

"They also need to make more effective their cooperation and there are two sides to this. So what we are doing here is trying to help with the Afghan side of this and to, like I said, help them succeed beyond where they have been able to succeed thus far," he added.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration is proposing $10.6 billion in US aid to Afghanistan in conjunction with the Jan 26 NATO ministerial meeting in Brussels, which will focus on international support for the country. McCormack said $2 billion of that total would be used for civilian reconstruction aid, and $8.6 billion for military assistance to train and equip the Afghan army.

"The new aid proposal is"a big increase," he said, noting that since 2001, the United States has provided a total of $14.2 billion in aid, $9 billion of which was used for security assistance and $5.2 billion for reconstruction, humanitarian and governance assistance.

"The pledge comes amid an ongoing review of Bush Afghanistan policy to see how US can help the Afghan people and the Afghan government succeed,"  he said.

"There are real challenges to that success, namely the Taliban as well as terrorist groups that are seeking to take that country back to where they were three, four, five years ago," McCormack said.