Thursday, March 24 2005 12:22 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

New Delhi: Pakistan is ready to pull out troops form the Siachen glacier as per an agreement between New Delhi and Islamabad, Pakistan Foreign Minister Khurshid Mohammad Kasuri has said.

"We are prepared to do it tomorrow. There was already an agreement between the Governments of India and Pakistan ... let's implement it tomorrow ... there was an agreement years ago," he said in an interview to NDTV.

He denied that there was any resistance from Islamabad on troop withdrawal from Siachen, the world's highest battlefield.

Ruling out an arms race with India, Kasuri said Pakistan always aimed at a certain level of deterrence and "we have succeeded in it".

"We have had that level of deterrence in Pakistan, whether it is conventional or nuclear, so we have achieved that. We are not going to compete with India," he said.

On discussions of the Pakistani leadership with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her recent visit there, Kasuri said, "We talked beyond arms. We are not hungry for arms but we do want definitively, some sort of conventional balance."

He said that a political decision had been taken in Pakistan to have peace with India and "we are not thinking of using nuclear weapons... therefore we should have a conventional balance".

"We cannot compete with India but what we can do, if we got our wits about ourselves, is to always maintain a certain balance keeping (in view) our economic conditions," Kasuri said.