Barack Obama, the US president, has signed off a bill that will provide Pakistan with $7.5bn in non-military aid, despite criticism of conditions attached to the assistance by Pakistani officials.

Obama signed the bill, which will provide the aid to Islamabad over the next five years, behind closed doors at the White House on Thursday.

Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, in a statement said the signing of the bill was the "tangible manifestation of broad support for Pakistan in the US".

Gibbs said Obama wants to engage Pakistan on the basis of a strategic partnership "grounded in support for Pakistan's democratic institutions and the Pakistani people."

Conditions criticised

However, the US congress still has to allot the funds set out in the bill, and the law must be renewed each year, subject to the White House declaring that "reasonable progress" is being made to meet the objectives of the aid.

Some members of Pakistan's military and parliament had said that some rules in the bill, such as making the release of some funding conditional on fighting al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters, represented a breach of Pakistani sovereignty.

But Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Pakistan's foreign minister, said on Wednesday that he was confident that Washington was not seeking to control Pakistan’s domestic politics.

John Kerry, a Democratic senator and an author of the bill, issued a statement on Wednesday, saying the legislation was not aimed at limiting Pakistan's sovereignty.

Obama 'supportive'

Nicholas Burns, a professor of Diplomacy and International Politics at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, said that the aid package was a "strong signal of support by the US to the people of Pakistan".

"It seems to me that the controversy over the bill within Pakistan is that some people are objecting to reporting requirements," he said.

"Any administration in a democratic country, like the US, when it spends money has to be able report back to congress on how the money was spent and who received it.

"In the past few years, some of the criticism from within Pakistan has been about the approach of the Bush administration [and whether it could] do more on the economic side, and build up the capacity of the Pakistani people.

"This is exactly what the Obama administration has done with this [new] programme."

The US, which is the biggest provider of aid to Pakistan, is seeking Pakistani government and military assistance to hunt down al-Qaeda leaders.

Many of those suspected fighters are thought to be based in Pakistan’s border region with Afghanistan, where US and Nato forces are fighting al-Qaeda and Taliban loyalists.