As planned, the sale of 18 new F-16s to Pakistan is proceeding, in spite of the Bhutto assassination, the instability of the Musharraf government, and the manifest inability of the F-16 to contribute to any goal of Pakistani statecraft worth pursuing. Biden says the right things:
On Jan. 2, U.S. Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., publicly attacked the sale as a “dangerously misguided” policy by the Bush administration. Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a Democratic candidate for president, pointed out that the recent passage of the Defense Appropriations bill blocks any assistance to Pakistan for arms sales that are not for counterterrorism missions. Biden also chastised the administration for releasing the F-16s just after Bhutto's assassination.“It sends the wrong message to the Pakistani generals, and to the Pakistani people,” he said.
Way back when, the US embargoed the delivery of 38 F-16s to Pakistan (while Benazir Bhutto was Prime Minister), because of concerns over Pakistan's nuclear program. Those considerations have been replaced by concerns about Chinese influence (China is working on an advanced fighter aircraft program with Pakistan) and by the perceived need to remain on the good side of Pakistan's military. This latter is probably the more crucial consideration; while the F-16s will do almost nothing to contribute to Pakistan's military capability in the tribal regions, their sale indicates that we still trust the military leadership. A potential problem with the F-16 specifically is its general availability. After the Iran-US relationship went belly up in 1979, Iran's fleet of F-14s became largely useless, because only the US could provide spare parts. Remarkably, the Iranians have managed to cobble enough parts together to keep a couple of squadrons in the air, but the lack of a consistent supplier remains a handicap. F-16s are operated by almost two dozen countries, and spares are not hard to come by; Venezuela, for example, continues to fly its F-16s without too much apparent difficulty. If things go really south in Pakistan, more F-16s could be a problem rather than a solution. --Robert Farley
