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The United States should not put conditions on an expected substantial increase in U.S. aid to its ally Pakistan, Pakistan's prime minister told visiting U.S. Senator John Kerry on Monday.

Pakistan is struggling to stem surging Islamist violence and put back on track an economy being kept afloat with the help of a $7.6 billion International Monetary Fund loan. Pakistan is due to make its case for help to allies and donors at meetings in Tokyo on Friday, where it hopes to win $4 billion in aid over the next two years to fill a financing gap.

The United States is expected to make a pledge of substantial help although U.S. President Barack Obama has said the release of additional aid would depend on how Pakistan tackled terrorism. Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani told Kerry, chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that Pakistan needed unconditional help. "The U.S. should not attach conditionalities to the assistance," Gilani's office quoted him as saying. "Aid with strings attached would fail to generate the desired goodwill and results."

s Pakistani forces continue to battle an advancing Taliban, the leading senators on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee introduced legislation Monday tripling aid to the country.

Speaking at a news conference capping his 100th day in office, Obama said the United States has "huge national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable" and doesn't end up a "nuclear-armed militant state."

The $1.5 billion per year would triple U.S. non-military aid levels, currently at $500 million per year. The legislation also would separate military from non-military aid, promising that economic aid "is no longer the poor cousin to military aid."

Sudan's government has agreed to allow some aid back into Darfur following its expulsion of humanitarian groups, US Senator John Kerry has said.

Sudan expelled the aid groups after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudan's president.

A Sudanese official indicated that the expelled groups would not be allowed to return to Darfur.

The White House meetings with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai are likely to be cagey affairs -- both visitors have been heavily criticized by Obama's administration and are also wary of each other. Equally, Obama's new strategy for defeating al Qaeda and Taliban militants operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan has not been universally welcomed in either country.

As it seeks reliable allies in the region, the United States, which has funneled $10 billion in aid to Islamabad over the past eight years, can sometimes give conflicting signals. At times it has praised Pakistan's military and at others accused it and its powerful spy agency of helping al Qaeda.

"Some have raised concern that elements within the Pakistani military and intelligence services may be sympathetic to militant groups, leading to caution on our part," Obama's undersecretary of defense for policy, Michele Flournoy, told the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee last week.

The Zionist Organization of America issued a statement on Friday calling the Cairo speech “strongly biased” against Israel. A statement by the organization’s president, Morton A. Klein, said Mr. Obama’s remarks “may well signal the beginning of a renunciation of America’s strategic alliance with Israel.”

Some of the concerns that supporters of Israel voiced about Mr. Obama before he took office began to dissipate as he assembled a staff that includes a White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who was a civilian volunteer in the Israeli armed forces, and a secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who established strong pro-Israel credentials during her years as a senator from New York.

Mrs. Clinton said last week that a freeze meant no “natural growth exceptions,” and some Israeli officials have contended that the Obama administration is, in effect, telling Israeli settlers that they cannot have babies. Most Middle East experts say the term “natural growth” applies to actual construction of additional units within the settlements’ existing boundaries. “We can’t tell people that they can’t have a child,” Mr. Ackerman said.