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India-Pakistan
Pakistan needs modern weapons to counter insurgency: ex-PAF officer
2008-02-19
A former senior officer of Pakistan Air Force has called on the West to provide his country with modern weapons for dealing with counter insurgency and to avoid collateral damage.

Air Marshal (retd) Masood Akhtar was speaking at a seminar titled "The Role of Air Power in Counter-Insurgency. Pakistan's Experience in the Tribal Region" at the International Institute of Strategic Studies here on Thursday. He said the Pakistani forces are battling a Taliban insurgency in the tribal areas in the NWFP in which the PAF is playing an important role. However, he added that helicopters rather than fixed-wing warplanes had been found more useful in these hilly areas.

Air Marshal Masood, who has been a fighter pilot for 35 years and with over 2,500 hours of flying experience on a variety of PAF fighter and training aircraft, said the Air Force had been using this air power with caution and restrain in order to prevent collateral damage. He was of the view that precision guided ammunitions were better suited for PAF's requirement rather than 1,000-pound or 500-pound bombs which caused greater collateral damage. "If we are provided with smaller and smarter bombs, we could easily avoid unintended damage to civilian life or property," he said. For the air power to be successful in counter-insurgency, he said a lot depended on good ground intelligence because any wrong information could lead to unwarranted damages.
Then again, he could take a lesson from the Indian Army, as hateful as that sounds. The Indians have been doing counter-insurgency in Kashmir for quite a while, and as moderator John Frum documents, they've been hammering the jihadis without leveling the villages. It's required pain-staking COIN and it puts the Indian soldiers at greater risk.
Indeed. India has never used airpower or artillery during COIN operations. The article by Thomas Marks gives an overview of the strategy. This requires boots on the ground and a proper COIN grid. Pakistan could succeed at this if they actually moved against the sources of jihad. That would require real action against the jihadi network and therein lies the problem. The same network that produces the jihadi forces fighting the Pakistani state is the one they rely on for the jihad in India and Afghanistan. If they shut it down, there is no 'strategic depth' in Afghanistan and no 'bleeding India by a thousand cuts'.
Air Marshal Masood, who also served as a Commandant, Air War College, during the course of his service with the PAF, noted that damages to civilian life and property had resulted into a backlash which had been evident by the recent attacks on the PAF personnel by suicide bombers. He also explained the circumstances, which led to the rise of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and said such extremists groups emerged as a result of the global politics in which Pakistan, willy-nilly, had been caught up with and was paying a heavy price.

Masood said during the Soviet Unionís 10 years of occupation of Afghanistan, the PAF had brought down a dozen Soviet and Afghan Air Force planes found in violation of the Pakistan territory. The retired air force officer said Pakistan was pushed into thinking itself as a citadel of Islam as a consequence of the Cold War in which the West's primary motive was to defeat Communism of the Soviet Union and stop its spread.

He said both Osama Bin Laden and Mulla Omar had used globalisation to the hilt and achieved their objectives. He stressed the need for launching political, economic and social campaigns in the tribal areas to win the hearts and minds of the people and wean them from extremist ideology.

Masood called for overhauling the education system in Pakistan with greater focus on providing an effective primary education to replace religious seminaries. "Only a well-established and efficient unified education system could provide a basis and sense of nationhood," he asserted.
He's got that right. Who has the stones to shut the madrassas?
He pointed out the difficulties of fighting an enemy without a face and thought that Pakistan will have to fight such non-state factors for a long time.

Responding to questions, he said there is reluctance on the part of the West to give Pakistan sophisticated weapons while the country is averse to allowing Nato troops to operate inside its borders.
Posted by:john frum

#6  Especially ones who counteract recent Indian acquisitions/developments?
Posted by: g(r)omgoru   2008-02-19 18:00  

#5  Direct military aid is what is really required for Pakland. And, the airburst will detonate at 1500 feet.
Posted by: Woozle Elmeter 2907   2008-02-19 09:23  

#4  Pakistan needs more spine modern weapons to counter insurgency: ex-PAF officer

There fixed.
Posted by: Besoeker   2008-02-19 08:14  

#3  I'm all for Giving selling Pakistan American rocks and sticks with instructions.
Posted by: RD   2008-02-19 05:28  

#2  A good article...

Jammu & Kashmir: State Response to Insurgency - The Case of Jammu
By Thomas A. Marks

Posted by: john frum   2008-02-19 05:22  

#1  'Scusi? We've sent $bns to Pakland in military aid and they've used it to armor up against India. Well, except for all the bits the Pak bureaucracy stole and sold to the militants.

Pfeh.
Posted by: Seafarious   2008-02-19 00:39  

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