China replacing US in supplying arms to Pak: FT

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is gradually reducing its dependence on American military technology and China is illing the gap, says a Financial Times (FT) report, which also warns that this shift will have geo-political repercussions.

The report notes that the shift started in the last few months of the Obama administration, when Congress blocked the sale of eight F-16 ighter jets to Pakistan.

In Islamabad, this move was seen as a confirmation of Pakistan’s fear that the United States “could no longer be relied on as their armed forces’ primary source of advanced weapons”, the report adds.

The US ban accelerated Pakistan’s efforts to shift its “military procurement away from american-made weapons towards Chinese ones, or those made domestically with Chinese support.”

The report also quotes data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, showing that since 2010, US weapons exports to Pakistan have plummeted from $1 billion to just $21 million last year.

During the same period, those from China have also fallen, but much more slowly, from $747m to $514m, making China the biggest weapons exporter to Pakistan.

“The shift coincided with Islamabad’s growing suspicion about the closeness between the US and India, but was accelerated by the killing of Al Qaeda leader Os am a bin laden on pakistani soil in 2011, which badly damaged relations with the US,” the report added.

US President Donald Trump’s decision to suspend $2bn of military aid to Pakistan - announced in January - further exacerbated the situation.

Identifying one immediate impact of the move, the FT noted that US oficials were “now inding that Islamabad is less responsive than usual” to their requests for support in Afghanistan.

Harrison Akins, a research fellow at the Howard H Baker Jr Centre for Public Policy at the University of Tennessee, told FT: “The Trump administration’s decision … can only push Pakistan further into the arms of Beijing - especially with Pakistan’s shift from US military supplies to Chinese military supplies.”

The report also identiied longer-term consequences of this development, noting that sales of weapons systems, often backed by preferential in an ci al terms, were central to the way the US managed its network of military alliances and partnerships. But many of those countries were now buying some of that hardware from other governments, particularly China.