WASHINGTON, Oct 21: Senator Joe Biden, chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, believes that if terrorists were to eliminate President Perez Musharraf, the United States should send troops to Pakistan to secure the country’s nuclear arsenal.

Mr Biden, who is also a Democratic presidential candidate for 2008, told ABC News on Sunday that if he were elected president he would ‘probably’ go in to secure Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

Mr Biden, a six-time senator from Delaware, strongly backs the power-arrangement the United States brokered between President Musharraf and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. The PPP chairperson met him during a recent trip to Washington, seeking his support for her bid to regain power.

“Here, you have a country that is on the edge, called Pakistan, with nuclear weapons and missiles to carry them that can strike the entire portion of that world, the subcontinent, all the way to the Mediterranean,” Mr Biden said.Interviewer George Stephanopoulos asked Senator Biden, “If President Musharraf or the elected leader of Pakistan were taken out, you would consider, as president, going in with the military?”

“What I would consider is uniting the world,” Mr Biden said. “It’s in everybody’s interest, not just the United States alone. The first thing I would do, I would call a meeting. I would ask for a meeting of the Security Council. I would be on the telephone with everyone from (Russian President Vladimir) Putin to the Chinese premier to our allies in Great Britain and Nato. This cannot be a US-alone operation.”

Senator Biden added that the United States was not doing enough to promote democratic institutions in Pakistan.

“There is a significant portion of the Pakistani population that is middle class and moderate,” Mr Biden said: “If you don’t have a fair electoral process allowing them to express their anger, their frustration, you force it all underground. You force it to the mosque, and the terrorists -- the extreme elements of that country, which are a large percentage in relative terms -- are going to take over.”

Mr Biden added, “We have a Musharraf policy. We do not have a Pakistan policy.”

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman proposed a reconfiguration of US aid to Pakistan.

“We should be in there,” he said. “We should be supplying tens of millions of dollars to build new schools to compete with the madressahs. We should be in there building democratic institutions. We should be in there, and get the rest of the world in there, giving some structure to the emergence of, hopefully, the re-emergence of a democratic process. But what are we doing?”