BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan, May 22 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) U.S. Army General Tommy Franks expressed hopes Tuesday, May 21, that tensions between India and Pakistan do not cause the Pakistanis to remove troops from the area bordering on Afghanistan.

Franks likened the tensions to the situation several months ago when India and Pakistan rushed troops to their common border in response to a terrorist attack on the Indian parliament.

"With respect to what we see right now, I don't know if I would characterize it as 'brink of war'," he told reporters from Tampa, Florida, where his U.S. Central Command is head quartered.

"I believe we are continuing to watch it carefully, and I believe the government of both Pakistan and India are doing the same thing," he said.

The U.S. military is relying on Pakistani troops to block the movement of suspected Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters across the Afghan border as U.S.-led forces conduct sweeps inside Afghanistan, reported AFP.

Franks said a number of Pakistani battalions were still operating in the border area despite the flare-up of hostilities with India.

"We are coordinating with those forces, and I really can't predict what may happen because of Kashmir," Franks said.

"We hope they'll continue to keep their people - the Frontier Corps as well as their other assets - operating in that border area," he said.

The two nuclear-armed countries have engaged in artillery duels in Kashmir since an attack by Islamic militants on an Indian army camp in Jammu last week, leaving 35 people dead.

Meanwhile, U.S. warplanes bombed suspected Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters who were seen setting up a mortar position overlooking a coalition base in southeastern Afghanistan, a spokesman said Wednesday, May 22.

The A-10 fighter planes "neutralized" the position but it was not known if any opposition fighters were killed in the attack some two kilometers (a mile) from the Pakistan border, Major Bryan Hilferty told reporters here, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The spokesman said the coalition forces had later inspected the area but found no bodies of opposition fighters. "Either they had not killed them at all or we had killed somebody or wounded somebody and they had dragged them off. It was a successful mission because the people are not there lobbing mortars at us."

Hilferty insisted that the base was being set up by Al-Qaeda or Taliban forces. "We can just look at some of the indicators: there were people on top of the hill digging ... all having weapons, very close to the Pakistan border ... it appears that they were going to dig in their mortars and aim them at our position there."

Hilferty said the attack had taken place south of Khost city where U.S. troops have set up camp on the local airfield, but denied that the enemy forces had targeted the base, which has come under rocket attack on at least five occasions in the last few weeks.

The U.S. has claimed that hundreds of Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters have crossed over the border into Pakistan in the aftermath of Anaconda and U.S. sources have claimed that the bulk of the terror network is no longer in Afghanistan.

Small groups of U.S. soldiers are understood to have conducted missions in northwestern Pakistan alongside Pakistani soldiers in the hunt for extremist fighters.

Hilferty said that to date no enemy fighters had been pursued while crossing from Afghanistan into Pakistan. "As far as I know we have not pursued anyone who has gone across the border so we have had to stop," he said.

British spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Ben Curry said coalition forces had recovered an arms cache as Operation Condor moved into its seventh day.

Around 1,000 British-led forces are involved in the operation in southeastern Afghanistan, but Curry confirmed that British troops had had no contact with opposition fighters.

Around 10 suspected Taliban or Al-Qaeda fighters were killed in U.S. air strikes in the area last week after Australian special forces came under fire.