US selling F-16s to Pakistan a double game
The US decision to sell eight additional F-16s to Pakistan exposes the disconnect between the stronger strategic and defence thrust that it wants to give to its ties with India and decisions that damage India's security and aggravate the strategic challenges we face in our neighbourhood.
Balance
This may look contradictory to us, but this is how the US exercises its global hegemony. The US will pursue its larger interests and assert its freedom of action even if its decisions do not meet the approval of its partners. Across tension-filled regions, it juggles between opposing sides, constantly engages them and even arms them. The effort is to maintain a degree of balance between adversaries and avoid the eruption of an actual conflict by using the leverage it acquires through building political and security links with them.
We see this in West Asia in the Arab-Israeli conflict and in the western Pacific in the case of tensions between China and several of its neighbours. The US has forged exceptionally strong economic and financial ties with China that create a logic of their own in terms of how far it can go to confront it militarily and has, at the same time, defence treaties with east Asian and southeast Asian countries that would embroil it in a military stand-off if China became unacceptably assertive. Having already pivoted towards China since 1974 and created a strategic imbalance in the region in time, the US is now pivoting against China and seeks rebalancing.
The US is supplying additional F-16s to Pakistan knowing that India will react negatively. It has overlooked India's concerns in the past about arming Pakistan and will do so in the future. It believes that it has important equities in Pakistan and its representatives are quite clear that the US will not downgrade its relations with Pakistan to levels that would satisfy India.
The US will calculate quite coldly that India has no option but to live with the American decision, as in the past.
This would be so even more today when our overall relationship with the US has greatly improved, with numerous government level dialogues, our bid for greater involvement of US companies in our growth ambitions and, most importantly, expanding defence ties.
That the US is emerging as India's major defence partner despite its arms relationship with Pakistan conveys that we can live with this source of vexation. The cost to us of a downturn in our ties with the US becomes higher as our relationship grows, which gives it, as the stronger partner, more space to pursue policies in our region that go against our interests.
Pakistan already possesses a large number of F-16s, and so the justification that it needs more for counterterrorism operations is disingenuous. The US has to find a plausible justification for a controversial step and enhancing capacity to combat terrorism serves as one.
Terrorism
It is ironic that a country most implicated in terrorism regionally, including against the US/ISF forces in Afghanistan, is supposedly receiving means to fight against terrorists that it itself incubated in the first place and who now target Pakistan principally, not the West.
A further irony in giving Pakistan additional means to fight terrorism is that the Taliban have stepped up vicious terrorist attacks in Afghanistan under Pakistan's watch, including against India by targeting its consulate in Jalalabad a few days ago.
Pakistan's duplicity is patent in the admission in Washington last week by its de facto foreign minister - despite vigorous denials in the past - that the Taliban leaders are located on Pakistani soil. Now that Pakistan's links with the Taliban have become a diplomatic plus point instead of a liability, it can now admit to facts that it studiously hid earlier by claiming that Mullah Omar was never in Pakistan.
It also tried to make believe, contrary to facts that Mullah Mansour's anointment as his successor occurred on Afghanistan soil and not inside Pakistan. With the US, along with China, seeking Pakistan's assistance in the reconciliation process and thereby endorsing a role for it in the evolution of the political situation within Afghanistan - which Pakistan channelled in the worst possible directions in the past - it can now openly confess to its sins without embarrassment.
Disconnect
From India's point of view, the timing of the F-16 sale is wrong on many counts. Coming soon after the attack on our Pathankot airbase, it signals to Pakistan that its terrorist acts against India would not attract any serious rap on its knuckles by the US despite India and the US describing their mounting counterterrorism cooperation as a defining one.
Just when Narendra Modi reopened the doors to a dialogue with Nawaz Sharif, which the Pakistani military wants to constrict, rewarding the latter with advanced weaponry contradicts the US' own push for an India-Pakistan dialogue.
The delivery of F-16s builds General Raheel Sharif's stature, not that of Nawaz Sharif, which means that the distortions in the Pakistani polity caused by the dominant role of the armed forces that are responsible for Pakistan's disruptive regional and nuclear polices, with the use of terrorism as an instrument of state policy, will continue.
The F-16 sale also highlights the disconnect between greater India-US strategic understanding in the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean regions and serious gaps in their respective strategic perspectives pertaining to the region to India's west.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)