SOURCE: THE NEWS PK

WASHINGTON: US Vice President Joe Biden said in an interview published Tuesday that NATO can handle Libya without US help, saying Washington's efforts are better focused on places like Pakistan or Egypt.

"If the Lord Almighty extricated the US out of NATO and dropped it on the planet of Mars so we were no longer participating, it is bizarre to suggest that NATO and the rest of the world lacks the capacity to deal with Libya -- it does not," Biden told the Financial Times.

"Occasionally other countries lack the will, but this is not about capacity," he told the daily amid deep unease among the US public and lawmakers over military action in Libya.

Washington coordinated operations in the first days of allied intervention in Libya after the United Nations Security Council approved international military action to thwart attacks by Kadhafi forces on rebel-held cities.

It transferred command to the NATO alliance earlier this month, leaving the Pentagon primarily providing refueling and surveillance aircraft, but it still flexes its military might.

Biden argued that Washington had to decide whether to spend resources "focusing on Iran, Egypt, North Korea, Afghanistan [and] Pakistan", or give Libya more attention, stressing: "We can't do it all." "The question is: Where should our resources be?" he asked.

"This is about our strategic interest and it is not based upon a situation of what can the traffic bear politically at home," he said. "The traffic can bear politically more in Libya: There's a bad guy there, everybody knows he's a bad guy, the people don't like him, and so that's not hard," he added, referring to Kadhafi.

Fulfilling the UN mandate to protect Libyan civilians "is totally, thoroughly, completely within the capacity of NATO," he said. "Where we brought unique benefits to bear and unique assets we have applied those assets and we will."