An F-16 "Fighting Falcon" of the US Air Force
by Harbir Singh
The US has been bribing Pakistan to buy its cooperation in Afghanistan. This bribery has included not just civilian aid, but also payments for Pakistan’s Army, supposedly to defray its costs in combating Islamist militias that operate in Afghanistan from Pakistani soil, and sales of cheap used and subsidized new weapons notionally for Pakistan to carry out its counter insurgency operations. These weapons have included 1,000 air-to-air missiles, 100 anti-ship missiles, anti-ship missile protection systems for 7 ships, modernization kits for 60 of its F-16s, and 115 M109 howitzers, which are highly mobile 155mm armored artillery, packing a punch exceeding that of Pakistan’s T-80 and India’s T-72 battle tanks. Now there is this discounted sale of eight F-16s, again supposedly to empower the PAF’s counter insurgency operations.
Presumably the Taliban has its own air superiority fighters, battleships, tank brigades, and infantry battalions that require Pakistan to have these weapons for effective counter insurgency?
Of course not. These weapons primarily add to Pakistan’s military capabilities against India and bolster its defences from behind which it can carry out terrorist attacks on India. Pakistan and the US however insist that these F-16s are for counter insurgency operations.
This is nonsense and the Americans know it.
For one thing, the F16 is not remotely an optimal aircraft for counter insurgency operations. While advances in avionics and weapons systems have enabled jet fighters to deliver heavy hitting munitions with great precision, the inability of fast fighters like the F16 to loiter over the battlefield, flying low and slow, denies their pilots much opportunity to observe the situation on the ground, make decisions and act on them, to identify and attack small mobile targets, and to provide offensive and defensive fire in support of friendlies in close proximity to enemy forces. Fast movers like the F-16 have little ability to actually take part in the on-ground battle beyond simply zooming overhead at high altitudes dropping precision guided munitions. The F16 is a blunt, unwieldy, inoptimal weapon to use against the Taliban, besides being extraordinarily expensive to buy, fly, and use for that role.
If Pakistan is really in need of aircraft for counter insurgency operations and the US wishes to provide it with subsidized aircraft for that mission, why is the Pakistan Air Force not being supplied with the Embraer A-29 Super Tucano instead of F-16s? The A-29 is a low cost turboprop aircraft purpose designed for counter insurgency and close air support of ground forces in extremely rugged terrain. The A-29 is just about the most suitable aircraft for counter insurgency operations that the US can provide to Pakistan. Its cheap too. Pakistan could have 75 A-29s for the price its paying for 8 F-16s.
In fact, the A-29 is being supplied by the US to the Afghan Air Force as its primary fixed wing combat aircraft.
So if the A-29 is suitable for operations against the Taliban by the Afghan government, why is it not suitable for the same role in Pakistan? Certainly, it would not stand a chance in combat against the IAF’s Sukhois, but what does that matter if the intent is operations against the Taliban?
The answer of course is that Pakistan wants aircraft it can wield against India, not against the Taliban, and the US is happy to provide them under the cover of a phony story about counter insurgency operations.
Pakistan has no intention of using these F16s against the Taliban in a fight to the finish, and the US knows this. Senator Bob Corker, chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations has seriously objected to the US subsidizing the sale of these F16s to Pakistan with US taxpayer money on the grounds that Pakistan allows terrorist groups like the Haqqani Network that act against the US efforts in Afghanistan to operate freely from Pakistani soil. No one is under any illusions that Pakistan intends to act against these groups. Every interested party is well aware that the terrorist groups that have worked to deny the US success in stabilizing and democratizing Afghanistan are Pakistan’s allies, and that Pakistan intends to use them as its proxies to exert influence and control in Afghanistan after the Americans have been forced to withdraw in defeat.
All this points to Pakistan’s mastery of its own environment, its keen instinct for the weaknesses of the United States, and its understanding of primitive forms of statecraft revolving around religion and tribe that democracies are ill equipped to deal with or displace.
The US has been effectively entangled by Pakistan by the latter’s cunning understanding of American domestic dynamics. When the US insisted on Pakistan’s cooperation in bludgeoning Afghanistan after 9/11, Pakistan well understood that:
1. The US did not have the political will or the interest to stay entrenched in Afghanistan long enough to exhaust Pakistan’s ability to interfere
2. The US did not have the taste for suffering the quantity of casualties that it would take to create and sustain a viable, stable, democratic order in Afghanistan.
3. The task of stabilizing and democratizing Afghanistan was likely futile anyway, even without Pakistani interference, because hunger for power, greed, and an absence of idealism amongst the various factions would almost certainly cause any US built democratic order to collapse into a corrupt, vengeful, venal power struggle.
4. Given these realities, Pakistan had every interest in outlasting the US presence in Afghanistan and in the meantime doing everything possible to ensure that it came out at the other end as the patron of the factions that would win and take over after the US withdrawal.
5. America could be made to pay very richly indeed for its folly. Even as the US is made to understand that it cannot have its way in Afghanistan, it is also made to understand that as before 9/11, Afghanistan remains the most likely center for anti-American Islamist terrorists to organize, train and operate from. The US will need to preserve the ability to monitor the situation and act in Afghanistan. That means buying Pakistan’s cooperation.
In effect, Pakistan has trapped the US in a situation from which it cannot turn away and in which it must keep paying bribes to the Islamic Republic to retain some leverage to prevent Afghanistan from becoming Global Jihad Central HQ again.
One may then consider that Pakistan is a gangster and it has ensnared the US in a protection racket (“Pay me and I’ll protect you from being attacked by my thugs”), and these F16s are part of the payment of protection money.
India ought to expect that the US will be paying Pakistan under this protection racket for the foreseeable future. Instead of complaining about it, India should develop an awareness of how it too is in the grip of Pakistan’s devious web, and work out the strategic, political, and administrative focus and steadfastness to do something meaningful about it.
Why America is selling taxpayer subsidized F-16s to its enemy - TOI Blogs
