US monitoring Pak use of American missile
WASHINGTON: The United States has been “closely monitoring” Pakistan’s use of American-made defence equipment in an air raid across the Line of Control in Kashmir (LoC) on Wednesday, disregarding appeals to avoid military actions that could exacerbate tensions and imperil its future arms purchases.
Indian defence officials said on Thursday that Pakistan used American-made F-16s and Advanced Medium-Range Air-toAir Missiles (AMRAAM) in a raid across the Line of Control into India on Wednesday.
The raid was in retaliation to Indian air strikes on Tuesday on a terrorist camp run in Balakot, Pakistan, by the Jaish-e-Mohammed, a Pakistan-based group that claimed responsibility for the killing of 40 Indian security personnel in a February 14 suicide car bombing in Pulwama, Jammu and Kashmir.
Parts of an American-made AMRAAM missile used in the raid were presented to reporters at a rare joint briefing by the three defence services as evidence that Islamabad was violating contractual obligations to its chief supplier of subsidised military hardware, apart from flagrantly disregarding an appeal to avoid a military response to Balakot. “We are aware of the reports and [are] closely monitoring events,” a state department official sai, in response to a question if Pakistan was in violation of conditions under purchase agreements for using the American-made fighter jets and air-toair missiles against India.
US lawmakers, cutting across party lines, had successfully blocked a sale of eight — not new, but refurbished — F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan in 2016, proposed by the then Barack Obama administration, because, among other reasons, they had feared Pakistan would use them against India.
These fighter jets were meant to be used, according to the Pentagon’s Defence Security and Cooperation Agency (DSCA) — the department that oversees sale of US military equipment to foreign governments that are funded partly or wholly by the US — to “enhance Pakistan’s ability to conduct counter-insurgency and counterterrorism operations”.
The sale, to be subsidised by the US federal government, was unpopular with lawmakers. “Many members of Congress, including me, seriously question the judgement and timing of such a sale. Additionally, Indo-Pak tensions remain elevated and some question whether the F-16s could ultimately be used against India or other regional powers, rather than the terrorists as Pakistan has asserted,” Matt Salmon, a Republican member of the House of Representatives, had said then at a congressional hearing.
Brad Sherman, a Democrat, had added, “We need to offer to Pakistan those weapon systems well- crafted to go after terrorists and not crafted for a war with India.”
Predictably,therefore,thesale did not go through. And its collapse was celebrated then as proof of the growing clout of India and the Indian community in the US.
As proposed by the Obama administration,in a subsidised transaction, Pakistan was free to pay for the eight refurbished F-16 fighter jets in full, $699 million, and take them home. It never did.
And now Pakistan might just have put in peril its access, with the offensive strike into India, to US military hardware, especially those it acquired at subsidized costs — the “high quality stuff it got compared to the substandard alternatives it might have to bank on from China”, according to a US defence expert who didn’t want to be named.
A long-time observer of US ties with Pakistan and the transfer of security and non-security aid, including defence equipment, had doubts if defence purchases were tied to country-specific nonuse compliance clauses. Citing an official close to these transactions, the observer said, “As a rule, US arms sales contracts do not contain provisions limiting how the recipient sovereign state can deploy purchased equipment.”