[Mb-civic] US should scrap plane deal with Pakistan - Selig S. Harrison - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

US should scrap plane deal with Pakistan

By Selig S. Harrison  |  November 27, 2005  |  The Boston Globe

PAKISTAN'S decision to postpone the US-subsidized purchase of 77 
nuclear-capable F-16 fighter planes from the ailing Lockheed-Martin 
Corporation provides an opportunity for the Bush administration and 
Congress to call off a disastrous deal that the United States should 
never have proposed in the first place.

In economic terms, it would be reckless for Pakistan to pile on new 
foreign debt by spending $3.5 billion on F-16s. Even before the 
earthquake, Pakistan was a poor country, with per capita gross national 
income of $600 per year. Pakistan ranked 68th out of 103 third world 
countries surveyed in the 2005 UN Poverty Index, which measures 
longevity, living standards, education, and health. Now, Islamabad will 
have to spend $5.8 billion in foreign earthquake aid just to avert 
further impoverishment, not to mention billions more in the decades 
ahead on long-overdue development programs.

For the United States, the damaging strategic consequences of the F-16 
deal have become increasingly apparent since the White House offered to 
sell the planes last March. It is fueling an arms race between New Delhi 
and Islamabad just when a delicate peace process has begun to ease 
tensions in Kashmir, and it is rekindling anti-US sentiment in India 
just when the administration has started to move toward a ''strategic 
partnership" with New Delhi to strengthen India as a counterweight to 
China and Iran.

The Manmohan Singh government is already under fire domestically for 
siding with the United States against Iran in the Sept. 24 International 
Atomic Energy Agency vote to take the Iranian nuclear issue to the 
United Nations Security Council. Pakistan abstained in the IAEA vote.

The White House spin that Islamabad can pay for the F-16s out of its 
''national funds" is laughable. Pakistan's foreign exchange reserves 
have resulted from a cornucopia of post-Sept. 11 US aid and debt relief. 
A US-led aid consortium has rescheduled $14.1 billion in debt, and $3.9 
billion of the earthquake aid is in the form of new loans. The 
administration has provided Islamabad with $1.7 billion in economic and 
military aid grants, including $300 million just approved by Congress, 
plus $1.5 billion in loans and billions more in multilateral aid based 
largely on US contributions.

When Islamabad decides to start buying F-16s, it is likely to dip first 
into $750 million of unexpended US military aid grant funds to pay for 
some of the planes and to seek US government credits and loan guarantees 
for the rest.

The administration rationale for the F-16s is that Pakistan needs and 
deserves the planes in order to play its role as an ally against Al 
Qaeda and Taliban. But Pakistan makes no secret that it wants the planes 
for use against India. Islamabad gives only tepid support to the search 
for Osama Bin Laden, lets Al Qaeda and Taliban cells operate freely 
within Pakistan, and carefully limits its operations against Taliban 
forces hiding out along the Afghan border. In any case, to carry out 
military operations against the Taliban, Pakistan needs helicopters and 
communications equipment, not F-16s, and this type of aid is already 
being provided by the United States.

President Pervez Musharraf's importance as an ally against terrorism is 
sharply restricted by his unwillingness or inability to rein in Islamic 
extremist groups entrenched within the Pakistan armed forces and 
security services. Two of these groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba and 
Jaish-e-Mohammed, are aiding the destabilizing insurgent operations now 
going on in Kashmir and openly take credit for bombing attacks in 
Srinagar and New Delhi that have killed more than 70 people in recent weeks.

The damaging impact of new F-16 sales to Pakistan on US relations with 
India can only be understood against the backdrop of $7.2 billion in 
earlier US gifts of military hardware to the cold war military dictators 
in Islamabad who preceded Musharraf.

Pentagon assurances that US military aid to Pakistan relates only to the 
''war on terrorism" revive Indian memories of earlier reassurances by 
Dwight Eisenhower in 1954 that the program of ''limited" weapons aid to 
Pakistan then unfolding was solely for use against communist aggression. 
By 1965, the United States had provided $3.8 billion in military 
hardware to Pakistan. This led General Ayub Khan to launch cross-border 
raids in Kashmir that triggered a broader war, in which Pakistan, 
predictably, relied primarily on its US planes and tanks.

India had just begun to forgive and forget when the Soviet invasion of 
Afghanistan prompted the United States to supply Pakistan with $3.5 
billion in new weapons aid as a reward for serving as a ''front-line 
state." The nature of this aid package, centering on F-16s and heavy 
tanks, made clear that it was not intended for use on the mountainous 
Afghan border but rather to bolster Pakistan's balance of power in 
open-plains warfare with India.

Announcing the latest F-16 deal, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice 
declared that ''we are trying to break out of the notion that this is a 
hyphenated relationship, somehow, that anything good for Pakistan is bad 
for India, and vice-versa." On economic aid issues, that is a viable 
goal, but not when it comes to military aid. As C. Raja Mohan, India's 
leading pro-US voice, warned a couple of weeks ago, ''while 
de-hyphenation sounds good in theory, there is no way of ignoring the 
Pakistan factor in thinking about Indo-US relations."

What arouses ''growing concern" in India, Raja Mohan declared, is the 
current US drift to ''a long-term military relationship with Pakistan 
that would not take India's sensitivities into account and would 
overwhelm the proclaimed long-term US commitment to a strategic 
partnership with India."

The United States is seeking to appease India by offering comparable or 
superior aircraft. But history shows that US efforts to orchestrate a 
military balance between New Delhi and Islamabad embolden Pakistan to 
stir up trouble with India by giving it artificially inflated military 
power that it could otherwise not afford.

The size and character of American military aid to Islamabad should 
reflect Pakistan's transitory importance to the United States as a 
regional power adjacent to Afghanistan. It should be limited to hardware 
directly related to operations against Al Qaeda and Taliban forces. 
Military sales to India, a subcontinental giant eight times larger than 
Pakistan, should reflect the much broader US stake in an enduring 
strategic partnership with a rising economic and military power 
increasingly important to the United States in the global geopolitical 
balance.

Selig S. Harrison, author of four books on South Asia, is director of 
the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy in Washington.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/11/27/us_should_scrap_plane_deal_with_pakistan/
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