26 November 2004	Friday	13 Shawwal 1425

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WASHINGTON, Nov 25: Pakistan hopes to finalize purchase of 18 to 25 F-16 multi-role fighter aircraft from the United States during the first half of next year, a leading defence weekly reported on Thursday.

This follows the US Department of Defence's notification to Congress on Nov 15 for selling more than $1.2 billion of sophisticated weapons to Islamabad, the US edition of the Jane's Defence Weekly reported. The two proposed deals are not related.

The $1.2 billion package includes eight P-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft, equipped with T-56 engines, requested for the Pakistan Navy under a foreign military sales contract with a potential value of $970 million.

According to the report, Pakistan has also requested 2,000 Tube-launched, Optically tracked Wire-guided-2A (TOW-2A) missiles and 14 TOW-2A fly-to-buy batch evaluation missiles, valued at $82 million.

The TOW package will equip the Pakistan Army Aviation Corps AH-1 Cobra attack helicopters in continuing operations against militants in the semi-autonomous mountainous tribal belt bordering Afghanistan.

Islamabad has also requested six new Phalanx close-in weapon systems for the Pakistan Navy, along with an upgrade for six already in the navy's inventory, under a package with a potential value of $155 million.

Islamabad had given no previous indication of its interest in such a programme. During a visit to Washington last week, Indian Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran had asked US authorities to assure India that they will not sell F-16 jet fighters to Pakistan.

Later, diplomatic sources in Washington told Dawn that instead of giving such an assurance, the Bush administration only informed Mr Saran that so far it had made no decision on this issue.

Mr Saran also conveyed India's concerns over the proposed $1.2 billion US arms package for Pakistan but failed to convince the Bush administration to reconsider its decision. And earlier this week, State Department's deputy spokesman Adam Ereli snubbed an Indian journalist who had suggested that the United States cannot hope for good relations with India while selling weapons to Pakistan.

"There should be no question that you can have good relations with one country and sell arms to another country. It's not a mutually exclusive proposition, and nor should it be," said Mr Ereli.

When the reporter suggested that the US arms package for Pakistan will encourage India to acquire weapons from other nations, Mr Ereli said: "Countries are free to buy arms from whatever their source.

The question is what is the purpose of those acquisitions? What does that represent for the strategic balance in the region? And that's how we evaluate these sorts of things."

He said US arms sales to other countries were "governed by US interests and congressional legislation, it's transparent, it's publicly notified, and we've done that in the case of the recent transactions (for Pakistan) in question."

When the reporter referred to a statement from New Delhi saying that US arms supplied to Pakistan have often been used against India, Mr Ereli said: "I'm not interested in getting in a debate with Indian officials about US arms sales policy."

Such reactions have further renewed India's concerns that the United States is actively considering Pakistan's request for the F-16s. The F-16 dispute got revived in September when PAF chief Air Marshal Sadaat Kalim told reporters in Karachi that the United States appeared willing to sell 18 F-16s to Pakistan to strengthen combat capabilities of its air force.

Soon after the PAF chief's statement, Rear Admiral Craig McDonald, head of the office of the US defence representative in Pakistan, told a Pentagon-organized conference on security cooperation that the Bush administration was considering a proposal to sell F-16s to Pakistan but will seek Congress's approval first.

The United States had given 40 F-16s to Pakistan when it was supporting the US effort to drive the then Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. But in 1990, Congress passed legislation halting delivery of the jets because the US believed Pakistan was making a nuclear bomb.