March, 31 2005	Thursday	20 Safar 1426

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WASHINGTON, March 30: Ambassador Jehangir Karamat has denied the charge that Pakistan had tampered with the F-16s it received from the US in the 1980s to make them nuclear capable but insisted that the country has the delivery system for its nuclear weapons. “When you have a capability, you have to prepare a delivery system too,” said Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States while talking to Dawn on the US decision to resume the sale of F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan after almost two decades.

“We should have the confidence that Pakistan is also capable of matching its (nuclear) weapons with a delivery system but it did not tamper with any weapon system it acquired from another country,” said the former army chief.

Since Friday, when the Bush administration announced its plan to sell more F-16s to Pakistan, reports in the US media suggested that Pakistan had configured the F-16s it received in the 1980s to make them capable of carrying nuclear weapons.

Pakistan had received 32 F-16s in the 1980s but a subsequent sale of more F-16s was blocked in 1990 following a dispute with the then US administration over Islamabad’s nuclear program.

In 1989, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence Arthur Hughes told Congress that the F-16s the United States had supplied to Pakistan could not carry nuclear weapons and Pakistan did not have the capability to reconfigure the F-16s to make them nuclear capable.

But this week, US media reported that Pakistan had somehow acquired this capability. In an interview to Dawn, Ambassador Karamat said it was wrong to suggest that the F-16s only had a symbolic importance. Rejecting the impression that the United States was persuading Pakistan to buy the aircraft, Gen Karamat said: “We had requested the F-16s. We had options for buying other aircraft as well but we opted for the F-16s because we have been using them for sometime. We are familiar with the system and we preferred F-16s to others after trying at all levels.”

He described the US decision to sell F-16s to Pakistan as “a very positive development” and said some people in Pakistan had this tendency to find faults in “every achievement.”

The US offer, he said, had a “positive symbolic importance” in the sense that Washington had sanctioned Pakistan in the past and had even stopped selling spares for the planes it had previously supplied.

“There has been an overall improvement in our relations with the United States. It is not just the F-16s but a whole package. We have received some of those weapons and will receive more.”

Gen Karamat said the US offer to India “does not minimize” the importance of its offer to Pakistan because it’s not just the Americans who want to sell weapons to India.

“The Indians already have Russian and East European equipment, such as Mig 21 and Su-30 that they received from Russia along with transfer of technology. Indians also have French Mirages.”