January 13, 2002	Sunday	Shawwal 28, 1422

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WASHINGTON, Jan 12: Tensions between Pakistan and India have prompted Pakistani and US military officials to reassess the disposition of US forces in Pakistan in the event of a conflict, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Friday.

Rumsfeld said President Pervez Musharraf has been “exceedingly cooperative” and that the issues raised by the higher states of military mobilization in Pakistan and India were being discussed in a “very orderly and sensible way”.

Among those issues, he said, was US access to Pakistani airspace in the event of a conflict as well as the disposition of US forces at air bases in Pakistan.

“I think that there has been discussion about aircraft and apron space and fuel and a variety of other things,” he said at a Pentagon news conference.

The Washington Post reported that as tensions with India mounted, Islamabad late last month informed Washington it needed to use two of the four bases that US forces have been using to fight the war in Afghanistan.

There were conflicting accounts as to whether the Pakistan Air Force had moved into two of the bases — at Jacobabad and Pasni — or whether the government had only notified Washington that they would do so in the event of a conflict, the Post said.

The tensions between Pakistan and India have given greater urgency to the need for other basing options.

The United States has recently obtained access to new bases for air operations in Kyrghyzstan and Uzbekistan, and is working to expand its operations in Kandahar.

“Needless to say, if you have two countries, India and Pakistan, that clearly have gone from a circumstance of not being mobilized to a circumstance of some higher level of mobilization, in that process, they begin to move their capabilities around,” Rumsfeld said.

“And as they do, in the case of Pakistan, they find us in various locations; and that had not been part of their plan,” he said.

Those issues were being thrashed out by the Pakistan’s military high command and the US Central Command in complex discussions, he said.

“We discuss these things and work it out: How do you do this? And what if they need to bring more people, more aircraft in to some airport, for example?” he said.

“Another issue that comes up is, in the event of a conflict, obviously, Pakistan would have a very different view about the use of its airspace than it does now, not in a conflict,” he said.

“Right now we have the ability to move things in across that country. And there would be the whole issue of ‘deconfliction’ or no flying,” he said.—AFP