Arms race between India and Pakistan takes to air

ISLAMABAD: India’s plans to modernise its ageing air force have triggered a tit-for-tat Pakistani programme that could exacerbate strategic tensions in South Asia, officials and analysts told "The National".



Defence analysts said the planned air force expansions were part of an arms race between India and Pakistan that dates back to the 1960s and the height of the Cold War.

The South Asian neighbours, both of which possess nuclear arsenals, have fought three wars and as many regionalised conflicts since gaining independence from British colonial rule in August 1947.

Siemon Wezeman, senior fellow at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s arms transfer programme, said: "Although India and Pakistan deny it, an arms race is on. India wants to become a regional power, and is building its arsenal accordingly, while Pakistan wants to maintain a rough parity for survival" in the event of another conflict.d

His comments came after an announcement by the Pakistani minister for defence, Ahmed Mukhtar, that Pakistan is to acquire 50 advanced JF-17 Thunder warplanes, to be co-produced with China at a factory about 50km west of Islamabad.

The new warplanes would carry an Italian "avionics package" that is far superior to the Chinese technology installed on the 30 aircraft currently being acquired by the Pakistan Air Force (PAF), military officials close to the project said. More >>>

Location: Islamabad

Who Cares in the Middle East What Obama Says?

May 30, 2011 "The Independent" -- This month, in the Middle East, has seen the unmaking of the President of the United States. More than that, it has witnessed the lowest prestige of America in the region since Roosevelt met King Abdul Aziz on the USS Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake in 1945.



While Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu played out their farce in Washington – Obama grovelling as usual – the Arabs got on with the serious business of changing their world, demonstrating and fighting and dying for freedoms they have never possessed. Obama waffled on about change in the Middle East – and about America's new role in the region. It was pathetic. "What is this 'role' thing?" an Egyptian friend asked me at the weekend. "Do they still believe we care about what they think?"

And it is true. Obama's failure to support the Arab revolutions until they were all but over lost the US most of its surviving credit in the region. Obama was silent on the overthrow of Ben Ali, only joined in the chorus of contempt for Mubarak two days before his flight, condemned the Syrian regime – which has killed more of its people than any other dynasty in this Arab "spring", save for the frightful Gaddafi – but makes it clear that he would be happy to see Assad survive, waves his puny fist at puny Bahrain's cruelty and remains absolutely, stunningly silent over Saudi Arabia. And he goes on his knees before Israel. Is it any wonder, then, that Arabs are turning their backs on America, not out of fury or anger, nor with threats or violence, but with contempt? It is the Arabs and their fellow Muslims of the Middle East who are themselves now making the decisions. More >>>

Location: Islamabad

A NEW STRATEGY FOR THE US: FROM THE CONTROL PARADIGM TO SUSTAINABLE SECURITY

The United States needs a new national security narrative, agreed a diverse panel of high-level discussants last week during a new Wilson
Center initiative, “The National Conversation at the Woodrow Wilson Center.”



Hosted by new Wilson Center President and CEO, Jane Harman, and moderated by The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, the inaugural event was based on a white paper by two active military officers writing under the pseudonym “Mr. Y” (echoing George Kennan’s “X” article). In “A National Strategic Narrative,” Captain Wayne Porter (USN) and Colonel Mark Mykleby (USMC) argue that the United States needs to move away from an outmoded 20th century model of containment, deterrence, and control towards a “strategy of sustainability.”

Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton University, who wrote the white paper’s preface, summarized it for the panel, which included Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to President Ford and President H.W. Bush; Representative Keith Ellison (D-Minn.); Steve Clemons, founder of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation; and Robert Kagan, senior fellow for foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.

Framing a 21st Century Vision

We can no longer expect to control events, but we can influence them, Slaughter said. “In an interconnected world, the United States should be the strongest competitor and the greatest source of credible influence – the nation that is most able to influence what happens in the international sphere – while standing for security, prosperity, and justice at home and abroad.”

“My generation has had our whole foreign policy world defined as national security,” said Slaughter, “but ‘national security’ only entered the national lexicon in the late 1940s; it was a way of combining defense and foreign affairs, in the context of a post-World War II rising Soviet Union.”

As opposed to a strategy document, their intention, write Porter and Mykleby, was to create a narrative through which to frame U.S. national policy decisions and discussions well into this century.

“America emerged from the Twentieth Century as the most powerful nation on earth,” the “Mr. Y” authors write. “But we failed to recognize that dominance, like fossil fuel, is not a sustainable source of energy.” More >>>

Location: Islamabad

What Confuses Pakistani's

If one were to listen to television talk shows, one would conclude that Pakistan’s enemy number one is the United States, and that the Taliban or


other jihadi groups, whether Pakistani or Afghan, can get away, literally, with murder.

Whenever there is a bomb blast, suicide attack or otherwise, our religious parties immediately credit Blackwater, and even RAW and MOSSAD with the said blast. And even when the reveren jihadis claim the blast, the press goes into the ostrich (‘head in the sand’) mode.

Now take the recent survey conducted by Geo Television in nine cities and 42 villages across the country. According to the report, 77 per cent consider the United States as the enemy. For them, the release of the CIA agent Raymond Davis was more traumatic than the usual suicide bomb blasts and 70 per cent blame President Zardari (not the intelligence agencies) for his release. And, connected with this anti-Americanism, half of the people surveyed think nuclear weapons (which everybody calls ‘assets’) are in danger (presumably from America). And that is probably why only seven per cent people are ‘happy’— relieved? — over Osama bin Laden’s death though, paradoxically enough, half the population is ‘sad or worried’, while also not believing he was killed at all. More >>>

Location: Islamabad

NSG Membership: A Criteria-based Approach for Non-NPT States

In 2008, the 46 participating governments of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) agreed to exempt India from the comprehensive IAEA safeguards requirement of the NSG Guidelines.

This “India exemption” permits suppliers to conduct civil nuclear trade with


India, one of the three states that never joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).1 The nuclear policy community widely believes this exemption undermines the credibility of the global nuclear nonproliferation regime.

The desirability of providing access to the safest and most efficient nuclear power technology to produce electricity while protecting the environment, even to non-NPT states, is perfectly understandable, even though such supply is contrary to both the spirit of the NPT bargain (as it is presently understood) and the letter of the NSG Guidelines. In agreeing to export nuclear items and technologies to India, the NSG should have required India to accept formally at least the obligations of the five nuclear-weapon states recognized under the NPT. The NSG also should have entitled India to less cooperation from the supplier states than that made available to NPT non-nuclear-weapon states (NNWS).2 Instead, the NSG exemption failed to commit India to a responsible nonproliferation policy. Moreover, the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Trade Agreement frees India to develop further its nuclear weapons program,3 grants India a generic consent to reprocess transferred nuclear material,4 and guarantees India fuel supply assurances that have never been offered to the NNWS, all of which agreed to disavow nuclear weapons programs in order to access civil nuclear technologies.

Now, the United States and India desire to take a further step by making India a formal member of the NSG and not just an adherent to its Guidelines. In considering Indian membership, NSG members should agree on criteria that would require India to conform to the contemporary understanding of the NPT bargain. The damage of the India exception is done, but some repair is possible in considering criteria applicable not only to India, but to all non-NPT States, thereby avoiding further discrimination among them. More >>>

Location: Islamabad

Understanding Pakistan's Nuclear Rationale

Three factors shed light on why Pakistan is rapidly increasing its nuclear weapons capabilities: India's fissile material stock; preference signaling; and the concept of moral hazard.






"Pak producing n-arms faster than anyone else", read one of the notes sent home by the US embassy in Islamabad as leaked by WikiLeaks. A recent study in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on fissile material and nuclear weapons' inventory points in the same direction. Pakistan has more nuclear weapons than India, and its weapons-usable fissile material inventories are larger than those of its bigger neighbor. In fact, Pakistan today possesses the fourth largest inventory of nuclear weapons in the world. The increasing nuclear capabilities of a country mired in internal conflict and considered to be a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism is alarming.
Three factors shed light on why Pakistan is increasing its nuclear weapons' capabilities: India's fissile material stock; preference signaling; and the concept of moral hazard.

Offsetting India's fissile material stock

Pakistan's main concern regarding India's nuclear capabilities is India's 1,300 kilograms of reactor-grade plutonium accumulated through many years' worth of nuclear waste generated by India's Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs). While PHWRs are the mainstay of India's (peaceful) nuclear energy program, the spent fuel that they produce is rich in plutonium-239 - a driving factor behind India's nuclear weapons program. After the 2005 Indo-US nuclear deal, India agreed to place a number of its nuclear reactors under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards. However, India also vehemently negotiated safeguard exemption for some of the PHWRs considered vital to its military program. As a result, eight PHWRs still remain outside IAEA safeguards. India's insistence on keeping some of the reactors unsafeguarded emanates from the ongoing debate about how many nuclear weapons should be sufficient for India's national security. In light of Pakistan and China's evolving nuclear weapons capacities, India would like to retain the possibility to vertically increase its numbers of nuclear weapons. More >>>

Location: Islamabad

Memo to Obama: Pakistan Is Not a Client State

Washington often acts as if Pakistan were its client state, with no other possible patron but the United States.


It assumes that Pakistani leaders, having made all the usual declarations about upholding the “sacred sovereignty” of their country, will end up yielding to periodic American demands, including those for a free hand in staging drone attacks in its tribal lands bordering Afghanistan. This is a flawed assessment of Washington’s long, tortuous relationship with Islamabad.

A recurring feature of the Obama administration’s foreign policy has been its failure to properly measure the strengths (as well as weaknesses) of its challengers, major or minor, as well as its friends, steadfast or fickle. To earlier examples of this phenomenon, one may now add Pakistan.

That country has an active partnership with another major power, potentially a viable substitute for the U.S. should relations with the Obama administration continue to deteriorate. The Islamabad-Washington relationship has swung from close alliance in the Afghan anti-Soviet jihad years of the 1980s to unmistaken alienation in the early 1990s, when Pakistan was on the U.S. watch list as a state supporting international terrorism. Relations between Islamabad and Beijing, on the other hand, have been consistently cordial for almost three decades. Pakistan’s Chinese alliance, noted fitfully by the U.S., is one of its most potent weapons in any future showdown with the Obama administration. More >>>

Location: Islamabad