WASHINGTON, Dec 14: Pakistan’s political upheaval is unlikely to affect a multi-million dollar air-to-air missiles deal, the manufacturers said.

Raytheon Missile Systems, which is based in Tucson, Arizona, has signed its biggest-ever international deal with Pakistan worth about $284 million. Under the deal, Pakistan will buy 500 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air missiles, known as AMRAAM, as well as 200 AIM-9M Sidewinder missiles from the company.

The deal marks the largest single international AMRAAM purchase and is scheduled to

be carried out in 2008. For-mally, it is the US government that buys the missiles from Raytheon and then sells them to Pakistan.

Paul Nisbet, a Raytheon analyst with the JSA Research Inc., told Arizona Daily Star that action against US arms sales to Pakistan was unlikely. “Politics very seldom has anything to do with changing the contract,” he added.

Many defence purchases by foreign governments, such as Pakistan’s, go through the federal Defence Security Cooperation Agency’s Foreign Military Sales programme. That program, Mr Nisbet said, is intended “to partly shield the company from the politics,” as well as to help countries that don’t have the “capability of monitoring these very complex contracts.”