WASHINGTON, Nov 4: Senator Joseph R. Biden, chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on Sunday that the United States should consider taking away F-16 fighter jets and other military equipment from Pakistan if the Musharraf regime does not withdraw the decree imposing an emergency rule.

Senator Biden told CBS television that he had “just exchanged” telephone calls with President Pervez Musharraf, urging him to reconsider his decision.

Asked what would be the first thing he would do on Monday, the first working day for the US Congress after the imposition of emergency in Pakistan, Mr Biden said: “The first thing I would do tomorrow is I would be on the phone with Musharraf, making it clear to him that there’s a price to pay if he does not rectify what he has just done.”

Senator Biden, who is also a Democratic candidate for the 2008 presidential election, said if elected, he would make it clear to Gen Musharraf “that our patience wasn’t unlimited” with him.

“And I would be making the point to him that to the extent that he has control of the military now, it’s questionable whether or not if we start to take away other things that they’re very concerned about -- F-16s and P-3s there, aircraft that are designed not to deal with the Taliban or Al Qaeda.” Mr Biden said that such equipment were designed to deal with Pakistan’s security relative to India and taking them away “may not have that kind of overwhelming support from his own military.”

The US senator said that what worries him most is the possibility that liberal political elements in Pakistan “will be in league with the extremists, not unlike what happened years ago with the Shah. ... We ended up with a circumstance where we not only had the overthrow of a Shah; we had an extreme government come into power.”

Mr Biden described President Musharraf’s appeal to the American people to understand his position as “pretty blatant,” indicating that it did not impress him.

The senator said that he was worried about a “total degeneration of that country,” which may allow the extremists to take control of the government and of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

Mr Biden said the Bush administration did not seem to know how to deal with this situation as “there’s still this faint hope that this martial law will last only a day or two. But I think we’re kidding ourselves.”