Pakistan's government has abdicated to the Taliban in agreeing to impose Islamic law in the Swat valley and the country now poses a "mortal threat" to the world, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has claimed.
Surging violence across Pakistan and the spread of Taliban influence through its northwest are reviving concerns about the stability of the nuclear-armed country, an important US ally vital to efforts to stabilise Afghanistan.
President Barack Obama, who last month unveiled a new strategy that seeks to crush al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in Afghanistan and those operating from across the border in Pakistan, meets the presidents of both countries early next month.
The talks illustrate US anxiety that Afghanistan could again become a haven for al-Qaeda militants to launch foreign attacks more than seven years after US-led forces toppled the Afghan Taliban regime.
Speaking to US legislators, Mrs Clinton said the Pakistani government had to provide basic services to its people or risk seeing the Taliban, and other extremists, fill the vacuum.
Under pressure from conservatives, Pakistan's president Asif Ali Zardari earlier this month signed a regulation imposing Islamic law in Swat, a northwestern valley once one of Pakistan's most popular tourist destinations.
Asked about the matter, Mrs Clinton bluntly replied: "I think that the Pakistani government is basically abdicating to the Taliban and to the extremists."
Speaking before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Mrs Clinton said, ominously, that the situation in Pakistan "poses a mortal threat to the security and safety of our country and the world."
Swat was a major tourist spot until 2007, when militants infiltrated the valley from strongholds on the Afghan border to the west in support of a radical cleric. After inconclusive military offensives and a failed peace agreement, Pakistani authorities accepted an Islamist demand for sharia, or Islamic law, in February.