Pak modified Harpoon to direct against India: US

WASHINGTON: Pakistan has illegally modified US supplied missiles for potential use against India, Washington has just discovered, in a belated
realization that uncontrolled supply of weapons to the dangerously unstable country poses a security threat to the region, including eventually to western forces in Afghanistan.

Judging by a suspicious missile test on April 23 this year, Pakistan has modified the US supplied Harpoon anti-ship missile to strike at land targets, according to American officials, who say the changes are a violation of the US Arms Control Export Act. The test was kept secret not publicly announced by Pakistan.

The US charge, which has set off a new outbreak of tensions between Washington and Islamabad, was made in an unpublicized diplomatic protest in late June to Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and other top Pakistani officials, the New York Times reported on its website on Saturday. The United States has also accused Pakistan of modifying American-made P-3C aircraft for land-attack missions, another violation of United States law, it said.

Expectedly, Islamabad has denied it fiddled with the Harpoon, and claimed it developed the missile itself. But Pakistan, it is famously said, does not even have the capability to make a tow-truck, let alone a missile. Its inventory is largely made of knock-offs of Chinese and North Korean missiles, and it now appears to have pilfered an American design to no great surprise.

What is surprising though is the timing of the leak in the US media, which appears aimed at questioning, if not torpedoing, efforts by sections of the Congress and the Obama administration to urgently supply even more economic and military aid to Pakistan, ostensibly to help in its war against extremists.

Critics of the five-year, $ 7.5 billion US aid package to Pakistan, which Congress is scheduled to take up next month, say Washington is bankrolling a basket case that has been selective and dishonest in its fight against extremist elements that it nurtured in the first place. Even US government reports have suggested Pakistan is using American arms to bulk up for a confrontation with India, even as many extremists remain state guests.

There is a strong demand in Washington for certifiable benchmarks before Congress signs off on the package, including scaling down its confrontationist posture against India, which the Pakistan military, long used to uninhibited expenditure, is resisting.
In the latest case, the Harpoon was originally sold to Pakistan as a defensive anti-ship missile, but it has been converted into weapon to strike targets on land. The NYT quoted American officials as saying that while the weapon in the latest dispute is a conventional one, the "subtext of the argument is growing concern about the speed with which Pakistan is developing new generations of both conventional and nuclear weapons."

In fact, the country's nuclear arsenal is said to be expanding faster than any other nation's, and it is making heavy investments in both nuclear and conventional weapons that experts say have no utility in the battle against insurgents. In other words, the build-up is still directed against India. "There's a concerted effort to get these guys (Pakistanis) to slow down," an unnamed senior administration official told the paper. "Their energies are misdirected."

However, at least one expert has contested the reading of the US officials on the Harpoon issue, saying Pakistan could not have modified the older-generation missiles (which were supplied during the Reagan era), which did not have the range for a land-attack. Pakistan, the expert said, already has more modern land-attack missiles that it developed itself or acquired from China. In an effort to clear the air, Islamabad is said to have taken the unusual step of inviting US officials to examine its Harpoon inventory.

The remarkable aspect of the whole episode is Pakistan's willingness to spend billions of dollars on weapons when the international consensus is that it faces no threat from India, particularly at a time it is reduced to begging for foreign aid to rescue the country from collapse. Even its long-standing allies China and Saudi Arabia have mostly turned their backs on Pakistan, leaving Washington and London to save it.

But the US and the so-called Friends of Democratic Pakistan (FoDP) appear to be holding Islamabad to a higher standard this time, insisting on knowing where and how it is going to spend aid money, before loosening the purse-strings. The NYT story appears to be part of the plan to seek greater accountability.

Pakistani officials returned empty-handed from a recent FoDP meeting in Turkey
, bitterly complaining about countries not meeting the $ 5.7 billion commitment they had made to Islamabad at a previous meeting in Japan. Another FoDP meeting is scheduled to be held in New York on September 23, by which time even the US Congress is expected to demand that Pakistan redirect its energies on meeting the internal threat from extremism, rather than prepare to confront India.