WASHINGTON, Oct 21 Alarmed by reports that the US administration may sell some F-16s to Pakistan if President George Bush was re-elected, India has strongly protested to Washington against the proposed sale, saying that it would spark an arms race in South Asia.
Pakistan has rejected the Indian protest, saying that there already exists a conventional imbalance to the detriment of Pakistan and the proposed sale will only help bridge the existing gap between the defence capabilities of the two countries.
Aware of the sensitivities of the issue, the State Department is telling both sides that Washington has not yet taken a decision on the matter.
The Indian protest followed a statement last week by Rear Admiral Craig McDonald, head of the office of the US defence representative in Pakistan, who told a Pentagon-organized conference on security cooperation that the Bush administration would go before Congress early next year to seek authorization for the sale.
“It’s a very long, involved process that will be taken up with our Congress once they come back after the first of the year,” press reports quoted him as saying.
Participants in a six-day US-India forum sponsored by the Aspen Institute and the Confederation of Indian Industry earlier this week said they told US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that such a sale, while manageable for the Indian military, would be taken badly by the Indian public.
Mr Rumsfeld did not comment on the prospects of the sale of the F-16s at the meeting but a retired senior Indian military officer later told reporters that he understood the plan called for an initial sale of 18 planes, with another 62 aircraft to be sold later.
The State Department, however, told Dawn that so far no decision had been taken anywhere, at any level of the US government, on the sale of F-16s to Pakistan.
Non-Pakistani diplomatic sources, while talking to Dawn, said the Indians were upset because they had reasons to believe that the US government was very sympathetic to Pakistan.
One such source said the US government had indicated to Pakistan that the door (to the F-16s) had not been closed yet and at some point, it might come up for serious discussions. Something might be moving, it might be even true, but nobody had made any decision yet, the source added.
Brigadier Shafqaat Ahmed, Pakistan’s defence attaché in Washington, told Dawn that Pakistan had raised the issue of F-16s at every level of meetings it had held with the US administration.
“We are hoping that the decision to this long-standing request will be favourable because it answers some of our very critical defence needs,” he said. But, he said, it was a long process which involved many meetings and reviews before a decision was taken.
Brig Ahmed rejected the Indian concern as baseless because, he said, the Indians had a capability that was far superior to what Pakistan did. There were already conventional imbalances, imbalances that every country tried to bridge, said Brig Ahmed. And this weapon system is one of many weapons systems that would redress a conventional imbalance that exists to the detriment of Pakistan.
He rejected the Indian protest that the sale of F-16s will spark an arms race in South Asia. There is no arms race going on. Our defence budget is frozen for many years and our defence expenditure is very modest.
An Indian official, however, told reporters that New Delhi was against introducing such advanced weaponry into South Asia. They were not useful in the war on terror, and experience had shown that they could be used against India. They could spark a build-up of a weapons race in the region, the official told the Washington Times.
In September, the Pakistani press carried a statement by PAF chief Air Martial Kaleem Saadat as saying that the United States had agreed to consider selling the nation F-16s fighter jets.
Washington sold 40 F-16s to Pakistan from 1983 through 1987, when Pakistan supported Washington’s efforts to drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. But in 1990, Congress passed legislation halting delivery of the jets because it said Pakistan was making a nuclear bomb.
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