BRUSSELS, June 7: US military commanders have been ordered to draw up contingency plans for the protection of US forces in Pakistan if war breaks out with India, the top US general said on Friday.

“If fighting broke out you’d have to have plans for what you’re going to do,” Air Force General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters here.

Myers said General Tommy Franks, the commander of the US Central Command, and Admiral Thomas Fargo, commander of US forces in the Pacific, have been asked “to look at force protection conditions and develop contingency plans”.

Myers said the situation on the border remained about the same as it has been in past several weeks.

“The fighting hasn’t broken out yet, other than the normal shelling that has been going on along the line of control. People are still doing the same roles and missions that they were sent there to do before the tensions arose,” he said.

“We know both sides are mobilized. What’s hard to tell is what the intentions are,” he said.

About 1,100 US troops are at three bases in Pakistan to support US military operations in Afghanistan.

Myers also said he was unaware of any plans for US troops to patrol the Line of Control.

British news reports said on Thursday US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was expected to propose a plan for US and possibly British troops to patrol the LoC during a visit next week to Pakistan and India.

Myers said he was aware of an Indian proposal for joint India-Pakistan patrols.

But, he said, “I’m not aware of any other proposal that would involve the US military.”

He said the US military had not analysed what such a mission would require.

But he warned that any escalation in the conflict would be difficult to control and that the consequences of a nuclear exchange would be devastating.

“It’s not just the numbers killed, but the impact it would have over time on infrastructure destroyed..., on agriculture, on humans that have delayed effects from these kinds of weapons,” he said.

“I know we know (what the consequences would be),” he said. “I don’t know what they know about that.”

Rumsfeld flew from Brussels to Germany for a visit to a NATO base and then to Estonia for a two-day meeting of Nordic and Baltic defence ministers.

He will also visit the Gulf before going to the Sub-continent.—AFP