Washington (AP) - Pakistan is on a rapid trajectory to failure as a democratic and stable state, and needs a boost of $4 billion in aid and loans each year to begin turning around, a private foreign affairs group has concluded.
 
"Time is running out," said the Atlantic Council, which called for more training and deploying another 15,000 police within six months to bring law and order to the country.
 
"Given the tools and the financing, Pakistan can turn back from the brink," the report said. "But for that to happen it needs help now."
 
The Pakistan government has six to 12 months to implement economic and security policies "or face the very real prospect of considerable domestic and political turbulence," the report said.
 
The United States has given Pakistan about $12.3 billion in military and economic aid. But the Government Accountability Office says the United States lacks a coordinated strategy in disbursing the aid and warns that al-Qaida continues to operate freely in Pakistan's unpoliced tribal areas.
 
Vice President Joseph Biden, D-Del., the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind, the panel's senior Republican, proposed last summer authorizing $7.5 billion over five years in nonmilitary aid for Pakistan. Similar legislation sponsored by the new committee chairman, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Lugar is expected this year.
 
Kerry and former Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., are the Atlantic Council's honorary chairmen. Hagel, having left the Senate, is now council chairman.
 
The Obama administration, meanwhile, has begun a policy review this week with senior officials from Pakistan and Afghanistan.
 
Here for the talks, Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said Wednesday he was pleased with moves to increase U.S. assistance to his country.
 
"We need economic stability," Qureshi said in an interview with The Associated Press. "Until we have economic stability we will not be able to get political stability."
 
He declined to put a price tag on Pakistan's needs.
 
The report "sounds the alarm that we are running out of time to help Pakistan change its present course toward increasing economic and political instability, and even ultimate failure."
 
The situation has grown even more urgent, the report said, with the terrorist attack on Mumbai, India's economic hub, last November that killed 164 people. The report urged Pakistan to show it is serious in pursuing the perpetrators and other terrorists and terror organizations. "The Mumbai crisis has yet to run its course," the report said, adding, "The use of military force or other coercive action must be avoided."
 
Another concern in the report is that Pakistan might feel forced to enter negotiations with Taliban and other insurgent groups and grant further freedom of movement to insurgents.
 
The report warned that al-Qaida and other radical groups could be emboldened "with frightening consequences for vulnerable targets in Britain, Europe and even the United States."
 
Compared with the hundreds of billion of dollars poured into Iraq and the many billions into Afghanistan, aid to Pakistan has been "relatively miserly," the report said. And the stakes in Pakistan are far larger and more important to long-term U.S. interests, the report said.
 
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AP reporter Anne Flaherty contributed to this report.