Pakistan's Threat Perceptions

This weekend the New York Times reported that the Obama administration has accused Pakistan of secretly modifying U.S.-provided missiles in contravention of the U.S. Arms Control Export Act. According to the article, Pakistan has altered Harpoon anti-ship missiles, 165 of which were sold to Pakistan during Soviet War in Afghanistan as defensive weapons, for use against land-based targets. Pakistan was also accused of modifying several P-3C Orion surveillance aircraft for land attack. The accusations arose after U.S. intelligence detected a suspicious, unannounced missile test on April 23:

Whatever their origin, the missiles would be a significant new entry into Pakistan’s arsenal against India. They would enable Pakistan’s small navy to strike targets on land, complementing the sizable land-based missile arsenal that Pakistan has developed. That, in turn, would be likely to spur another round of an arms race with India that the United States has been trying, unsuccessfully, to halt. “The focus of our concern is that this is a potential unauthorized modification of a maritime antiship defensive capability to an offensive land-attack missile,” said another senior administration official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter involves classified information.

Officials in Pakistan’s near and dear neighbor were none too pleased to hear the news, with out-going Indian naval chief Admiral Sureesh Mehta stating, “[t]here is a danger of proliferation. We have taken up with the Americans the issue of Pakistan modifying Harpoon missiles to attack land targets. Clearly this is a threat to India. This obviously has nothing to do with self-defence, it is going to be used against Indian interest.” Pakistani officials have denied that the missile is derived from the Harpoon, claiming that the missile was developed indigenously. Pakistan has even agreed to the unusually transparent measure of allowing the U.S. to inspect the Harpoon stockpile.

There is some doubt that Pakistan could, or even would, resort to reverse engineering an old U.S. design:

Some experts are also skeptical of the American claims. Robert Hewson, editor of Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons, a yearbook and Web-based data service, said the Harpoon missile did not have the necessary range for a land-attack missile, which would lend credibility to Pakistani claims that they are developing their own new missile. Moreover, he said, Pakistan already has more modern land-attack missiles that it developed itself or acquired from China. “They’re beyond the need to reverse-engineer old U.S. kit,” Mr. Hewson said in a telephone interview. “They’re more sophisticated than that.” Mr. Hewson said the ship-to-shore missile that Pakistan was testing was part of a concerted effort to develop an array of conventional missiles that could be fired from the air, land or sea to address India’s much more formidable conventional missile arsenal.

However, the Harpoon has been modified for land attack purposes in the past, in the form of the Stand-off Land Attack Missile (SLAM): developed in the 1980s and used during the Gulf War. Additionally, others are less sure that the design is indigenous, according to Time:

"It's quite possible that they may have made some modifications," says a former military official, speaking on condition that his name be withheld. "Because of the sanctions that were imposed in Pakistan in late 1990 [by the U.S. in response to Pakistan's nuclear-weapons program], the missiles stopped going to the U.S. for routine maintenance. They must have opened it up and probably extended its range."

Even if this story turns out to be false, it is representative of the difficulty facing current U.S.-Pakistani relations, with the U.S. urging Pakistan to confront the Taliban within its borders, while Pakistan continues to focus on the possibility of conventional war with India. The Pakistani military has remained fixated on historical rival India as its greatest security threat, despite increasing internal instability. They’ve only recently begun to view the Taliban as a major, even existential, threat, and in recent months about three million Pakistani citizens have been displaced by fierce fighting.

While encouraging extremists at one point may have seemed like a useful hedge against India in Kashmir and in stabilizing Afghanistan after the Soviet war, the reluctance to view militant extremism as a serious threat may cost Pakistan in terms of nuclear security. In recent years, at least three facilities suspected to be part of Pakistan’s nuclear complex have come under attack by militants, according to Shaun Gregory, a Pakistan Security expert at the University of Bradford:

…the scale of the potential destructiveness of nuclear weapons, the instability and “nuclear porosity” of the context in Pakistan, and the vulnerabilities within Pakistan’s nuclear safety and security arrangements mean that the risks of terrorist groups gaining access to nuclear materials are real. Moreover, militants have recently attacked a number of Pakistan’s nuclear facilities, including an August 20, 2008 incident at the Wah cantonment, widely understood to be one of Pakistan’s main nuclear weapons assembly sites.”

Although it is unclear whether or not they were targeted for the specific reason of attaining nuclear material, it’s evident that Pakistan did not take extremists into account when placing its nuclear facilities. Hindsight being what it is, many of Pakistan’s nuclear facilities were placed in the western and northern regions of the country out of fear of an Indian invasion, areas that are now populated with Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda.

As Congress prepares to return from August recess, it will soon be debating the Obama administration’s proposed five year, $7.5 billion aid package to Pakistan. In the past, Pakistan has funneled aid into its conventional armed forces arrayed against India at the expense of other projects. Even now it seems that Pakistan is reluctant to accept the possibility of aid conditional on nuclear security and confidence-building measures with India.