The chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, said on Tuesday that he did not come to India to persuade New Delhi to send troops to Iraq.
It is up to India to decide whether it wants to do so, he said in New Delhi.
"It is important to have the international community helping in this effort (stabilise Iraq), but it is up to individual countries to make that decision," Gen Myers said of the US request for troop contribution.
He said the international community's cooperation is imperative to win the 'war on terrorism and create stable countries in Afghanistan and Iraq'.
He said a stable Iraq and Afghanistan, 'a place where terrorist cannot gather', have to be created for defeating terrorism and 'India understands that as well as any other country'.
The general said he discussed with Indian military leaders the situation in Iraq.
In Iraq, 19 countries are on the field and the coalition will soon have 34 countries. In Afghanistan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation will start participating in September, he said.
"I was not asked to come here by anybody," Gen Myers said.
On speculations about the US getting a United Nations resolution adopted with explicit mandate for an international peacekeeping force in Iraq, Gen Myers said there was 'some thought given to that', but he wasn't aware of any definite decision on it. He added that he was not the right person to ask about the resolution.
He said the north and south of Iraq are 'really very stable'.
It is in the central part, between Baghdad and Tikrit, where 80 per cent of the security incidents have happened. "It is a war zone in many sense," the general, who was in Iraq before reaching India, said.
Iraqis are also cooperating with the US-led coalition, Gen Myers said. He added that it was the Iraqi people who came forward and told the Americans about Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay, who were killed on July 22.
He said most of the resistance was coming from remnants of the regime. "It is a complex situation."
