![]() After the Soviet pull-out, the BLA became defunct for lack of funding, but was allegedly reactivated recently under a young man who studied electronic engineering in the Soviet Union where he was cultivated by the KGB.Īccording to this report, the first training camp was established in Kohlu in January 2002 by two Americans and two Indians. Misha’ and Sasha’, the two KGB sources, claim to have created the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) on the back of the old Moscow-leaning Balochistan Students Organization (BSO). However, the four authors (including one Pakistani from Quetta) claim to have travelled 5,000 kilometres researching this report, and to have interviewed two ex-KGB officers in Moscow who were once tasked with fomenting trouble in Balochistan to punish Pakistan for its role in helping the Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation. Its website is given as com, but as I am writing this from a very small town in Morocco, I do not have access to the Internet, and cannot comment on its credibility. Recently, a reader e-mailed me an odd investigative report compiled by an organization called News Central Asia, based in Turkmenistan. But the acquisition of the F-16s should not distract us from the fact that the real dangers that beset us are internal, whatever the source of their support and funding. We live in a dangerous part of the world where the security scenario does not take long to change. So what aerial threats are the F-16s going to guard us against? I am not suggesting that our armed forces should not modernize their equipment. A war with Pakistan, with its potential for going nuclear, is the worst case scenario for Indian defence planners. I am no apologist for New Delhi, but were I in a policy-making position there, my worst nightmare would be an unstable Pakistan on the verge of fragmentation. Indeed, any objective observer will conclude that since 1948, Pakistan is supposed to have provoked armed conflict with India time and again. ![]() And India, whatever our military strategists and nationalist, right-wing think tanks might say, has regional and global ambitions which preclude any desire to seek a fight with Pakistan. Iran needs all the friends it can get in its present stand-off with the United States. And F-16s, wonderful interceptors that they are, are useless against internal enemies.Ĭonsider our immediate neighbourhood: Afghanistan, despite its old reservations about the Durand Line and its claim on Pakistani territory, is too weak currently to pose a military threat. The problem is that the threat we face is not from the air, but from within. And once the two dozen F-16s of the initial consignment have arrived, I am sure Pakistani airspace will be more secure than ever before. I suppose glasses of syrupy Rooh Afza must have been raised in toasts at GHQ and Air Force headquarters, and they must have danced a celebratory jig at the presidency. And now, after all these years, Musharraf is the one to have hit the jackpot. Successive ambassadors have spent their entire tenures in the American capital in a futile quest for the Holy Grail. ![]() FOR over 15 years now, every government in Islamabad has made the restoration of the supply of F-16s the centrepiece of its diplomatic and defence policies.Įlected leaders and military dictators have made the pilgrimage to Washington to plead their case.
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