Let’s hope that lessons have been
 learnt from the earlier F-16 fiasco

The US Defence Department has awarded a contract to Lockheed Martin Corp to supply
18 new F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan, besides upgrades for its current fleet of 34 F-16s,
as part of a $ 2.1 billion deal for new weapons, avionics, engines and other equipment 
By Kaleem Omar

A Washington-dateline report published in Pakistani newspapers on January 2, 2008 says that the US Defence Department has awarded a $ 498 million contract to Lockheed Martin Corporation of Fort Worth, Texas to supply 18 new F-16C/D fighter jets to Pakistan. Twelve of the planes will be from the F-16C series and six from the F-16D series. The F-16C is a single-seat aircraft, while the F-16D is a double-seat aircraft. The Pakistan Air Force already has a fleet of 34 F-16AM fighter jets, which are an upgraded single-seat version of the F-16A. The PAF originally had 40 F-16AM fighter jets that it bought in the mid-1980s, but six of the planes were lost in accidents over the years. 

In addition to the 18 new F-16C/D fighter jets, all of which will come from the Block 50-52 planes first delivered to the United States Air Force in 1991, and are due to be delivered to the PAF by 2010, the US has also agreed to supply the PAF with upgrades for its current fleet of 34 F-16 AM aircraft, as part of a $ 2.1 billion deal The Pakistani F-16s will be equipped with AIM-120C-5, AMRAAM, AIM-9M-8/9. JDAM, and Harpoon Block II missiles, and Joint-Helmet Mounted Cueing Systems.

The aircraft, upgrades, weapons systems, avionics, engines and other equipment will be sold to Pakistan under the US’s “Foreign Military Sales” programme, as was also the case with the 40 F-16s sold and delivered to Pakistan in the mid-198s, as well as the 28 F-16s sold to Pakistan under an FMS contract signed in late 1988 with General Dynamics Corp, the then-manufacturer of F-16 aircraft at its plant in Fort Worth, Texas. But the 28 F-16s bought by Pakistan in 1988 were never delivered because of sanctions imposed on Pakistan in October 1990 under the 1986 Pakistan-specific Pressler Amendment to the US Foreign Assistance. Act, which required the US president to issue an annual certification stating that Pakistan did not possess nuclear weapons.

All American military and economic aid to Pakistan was stopped in October 1990, when President George H. W. Bush – the present President Bush’s father – said he could no longer certify that Pakistan did not possess nuclear weapons.

That cut off all US aid to Pakistan, including the delivery of 28 F-16 fighter aircraft, which were part of a larger order for 42 F-16s that Pakistan had placed on General Dynamics Corporation of the United States in 1988. The aircraft were to be paid for in instalments under the US “Foreign Military Sales” (FMS) programme.

The problem with the format of the FMS programme is that all agreements under the programme entered into by US manufacturers with foreign buyers are totally one-sided, and heavily skewed in favour of the US manufacturer, with the foreign buyer having almost no rights and no recourse to legal action in the event of the paid-for equipment not being delivered to it.

It is a well-established international legal principle that one-sided agreements are “bad in law” since they violate the principle of equity. But the US has long disregarded established principles of international law when its own interests are involved, so much so that it is on record as having stated on more than one occasion over the years that it does not recognise the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice at the Hague when it comes to matters concerning the United States.

Given this fact, there was little that Pakistan could do when the delivery of the 28 F-16s to it by the US was stopped under the Pressler Amendment. What Pakistan certainly could have done, however, was to cease making any more quarterly instalment payments to General Dynamics Corp following the stoppage of US aid to Pakistan under the Pressler Amendment.

Alternately, Pakistan could have continued to make the payments not directly to General Dynamics but into an interest-bearing  US bank account controlled by the Pakistan government, with the proviso that payments to General Dynamics from the money deposited in the bank would only be released pro rata against the actual delivery of each aircraft, rather like the provision in bank letters of credit which  pro-rata payments against partial shipments. That way, the money would have remained under the Pakistan government’s control, and it would also have continued to earn a substantial amount of interest on the money on deposit in the bank.

The then-Nawaz Sharif government, however, chose to do none of these things. Instead, it continued to make payments of $ 90 million dollars per quarter to General Dynamics, with no assurance that Pakistan would ever get delivery of the planes nor any assurance that Pakistan would get its money back in the event of the planes not being delivered. The same fiasco should not be repeated this time, in the case of the new F-16s and other equipment that Pakistan is now buying from Lockheed Martin – the company to which General Dynamics sold its F-16 manufacturing plant in Fort Worth Texas some years ago.

One says this because the old adage “once bitten, twice shy” often does not seem to apply to Pakistani governments, which seldom seem to learn from previous mistakes and blithely continue to fall into the same trap over and over again. The whole previous F-16 fiasco of the 1990s is instructive in this regard.

At the time when the Pressler ban was imposed, Pakistan had made only an initial down payment of $ 50 million for the aircraft. Had Islamabad decided not to make any more instalment payments, the national exchequer would have been out-of-pocket only to the tune of that initial $ 50 million.

But the then-Nawaz Sharif government, in its infinite wisdom, chose to continue making instalment payments of $ 90 million dollars every three months, even though senior US State Department officials had publicly stated on more than one occasion that, after the imposition of the Pressler ban, there was “no question” of the United States supplying any military equipment or economic aid to Pakistan.

Between February 1991 and April 1993, I wrote a series of 14 detailed investigative articles for The News pointing out repeatedly that Pakistan would neither get the planes nor its money back and urging the government to stop further payments. The trick, in life, is to be wiser BEFORE the event, not after it.

All those warnings fell on deaf ears, however, and the Nawaz government continued to pay the instalments as and when they “fell due” under the terms of the original agreement with General Dynamics, notwithstanding the fact that the agreement had become invalid after the Pressler ban was imposed and the US government had refused to deliver the aircraft.

It was only after the Nawaz government was dismissed by then-President Ghulam Ishaq Khan on April 18, 1993 and the Balakh Sher Mazari caretaker government took over that Ilahi Bakhsh Soomro, a member of the caretaker cabinet, wrote a letter to the US manufacturer in May 1993 stating that no further instalment payments would be made.

By then, however, the total amount that had been paid to the manufacturer had swelled to $ 658 million – all thanks to the Nawaz government, though it was said at the time that an element of sleaze was also involved in the government’s decision to continue with the payments, with millions of dollars of the money allegedly going “missing” and finding its way into the pockets of Pakistani middlemen.

To add insult to injury, the US government continued to bill Pakistan several million dollars a year as “parking charges” for the 28 aircraft that were parked at a US air force base in Tuscon, Arizona. And that’s where they remained for more than ten long years, with Islamabad having to shell out some $ 20 million in parking fees.

But what has our old friend Larry Pressler been up to in the meantime? Well, he chaired the South Asia subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for a while in the 1980s and 1990s, but lost his senate seat in the 1996 mid-term congressional elections, despite receiving substantial campaign contributions from the Indian lobby in Washington as well as from Indian political action committees. That was proof, if proof was needed, as to where Pressler’s true loyalties lay.

Pakistan should not now get involved with some latter-day clone of the likes of Larry Pressler in connection with the new F-16 deal. No should it sign any one-sided FMS agreement. All agreements that Islamabad signs with US manufacturers should be based on the principle of equity. Make that, EQUITY.