Enlightened Stupidity

[MastanKhan]

Proud to be pakistani,

You are right. Why did the SU 30 not come into the picture---. As Salim stated about high altitude warfare----except for pakistani and indian armies, there was no other nation equipped and trained to do battle at 15000 ft elevations. And least of all, the air forces had been kept away from that skirmish.

A single SU 30 shot down would have been really embarrassing for the iaf---no ballz---that is why they didnot venture into pakistan---they would rue the oppurtunity the rest of their lives----as the pakistanis would the 1962 incidence and then in 1971 sitting back on the western front while indian army was busy in bangladesh.

So, technically, both the paf and iaf got caught flat footed. High altititude---very thin air---hardly any resistance to a falling bomb----so you want to drop the bomb here and it will fall somewhere else---same with canon shells, rifle and machine gun rounds, the trajectory is extremely unpredictable.

As far as atrocities committed in vietnam----they were unbelievable---absolutely without conscience. Both these conflicts had no clear goal in mind. The tragedy of iraq was Rumsfeld---the most incompetent sec def, that america has ever had---the man had absolutely no clue how to seek advice from the generals----always ready for a smart retort with a smirk on his face and arrogance his driving force. In the end the american generals decided that it is ok to be the yes men, do your time and take your retirement in due time as no one could win an argument from Rummy.

As to dabong1's comments----Pakistan's debt is not going to be reduced----as the economy gets better and there is more development---we will have more debt. But it is not a bad debt.

You have to look at the debt in comparison to other things as well. One thing is the loan percentages----when we were about to become a defaulter nation---our ratings were lower, close to D and rates comparatively high----now with our ratings at B+, our rates are on a very favourable term.

A simple example---a car loan in the US----72 months on bad credit about to be a defaulter---is 24.99 apr +++ which means a roughly on a 25000 loan the finance charges could be around 15000 to 18000 or more for the term of the loan.

Now the same loan on B+ credit would be around 6.99 to 7.99 apr, which would roughly amonut to 6000 to 8000 in interest charges for the same term of the loan. Now you answer the question yourself, what would you rather have. It is not at the same level on those big loans, but the difference in the rate is still there.

All leading developing nations have debts. You cannot use your savings to buy equipment but rather use someone else's money to make things right for you.

If that idiot Nawaz and his treasury minister had not frozen the the foreign accounts, the remittance from the over seas pakistanis would have been through the roof and that idiot would have been declared a hero and Sartaj Aziz a genius.

 

[irfan1173]

AoA
Mastan Khan
Su-30 were not fully inducted in IAF at the time of Kargil. In fact Su-30 mki were inducted only in 2002.

 

[Energon]

The Su30MKI wasn't inducted into the IAF in 1999. In fact that was one of the biggest problems. The IAF would have loved to have a strike platform like the MKI, but in the absence of it they had to use modified Mirage 2000s.

 

[MastanKhan]

Hi,

This is a cut and paste from globalsecurity.org

Under the contract, the Irkutsk aircraft production association will deliver 40 Su-30s in different versions to the Indian air force. In June 1997 the first batch of eight Sukhoi Su-30 MK fighters were inducted into the Indian Air Force's 24 Squadron at the Lohagaon air base near Pune. India was expected to import a total of 40 Russian fighters by March 1999. Deliveries were initially to start in the spring of 1998, but Indian Defense Ministry experts delayed their decision on the avionics equipment for the planes.

As of mid-2000 India had received only eight SU-30K air defence aircraft and none of the upgraded SU-30MK multi-role aircraft in the Rs 6310-crore deal signed with Russia in 1996. There had been no deliveries after May 1997.

 

[irfan1173]

Mastan Khan
The 8 Su-30k India received were vanilla version meant to familiarize IAF with the aircraft till the version(Su-30 mki) which IAF wanted was being developed. It takes couple of years to fully induct a aircraft ready to fight with all the training needed and setting up the infrastructure. All I am saying is Su30k were not ready to fight in Kargil.

 

[blain2]

From The Nation

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

“Never despise your enemy!”

BRIG (RETD) M. SHER KHAN

Those who do not learn from history will have to relive it.– George Santayana. “No one knew, though many were wise after the event, that these tribesmen were as well armed as our troops, and that they proved to be brave and formidable enemies….. Never despise your enemy is an old lesson but it has to be learnt afresh, year after year, by every nation that is warlike and brave.”

So wrote a young war correspondent named Winston Churchill about the Malakand campaign in 1879,during which the British garrison at Malakand and Chakdara forts were besieged for several days by the fierce tribesmen, the ethnic kin, maybe even ancestors, of today’s Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Then, as now, British troops faced a determined enemy described by Churchill as people “who fight without passion and kill without loss of temper.” Little has changed for the British (and US/NATO) troops today in similar terrain not far across the border in Afghanistan.

The United States, a much younger nation than the British but drunk with the arrogance as the sole surviving superpower, is now well and truly mired up to its neck in the sands and streets of Iraq, ever since George W. Bush and his coterie of warmongering hawks invaded that unfortunate country over three years ago on the flimsiest of excuses, together with a sizeable British and “Coalition of the Willing” contingents going along for the ride to lend some semblance of legitimacy to the ill-conceived and worse-executed misadventure.

Bush and company thought Iraq would be a cakewalk, and as one of his foremost advisors said before the invasion, it would be a “slam dunk” victory. And so it seemed at first as the “shock and awe” invasion by the Americans got underway. There was no resistance from Saddam Hussain and his vaunted Republican Guards, as the Iraqi military just crumbled under the onslaught. It wasn’t long before Bush proudly proclaimed “Mission Accomplished” on board a US Navy aircraft carrier after a Rambo-like landing in a fighter jet. This was followed by his envoy J. Paul Bremer announcing to wildly cheering Western war correspondents in Baghdad “Gentlemen, we’ve got him!” after the capture of Saddam Hussain.

American Forces contemptuously referred to Iraqis as towel heads and rag heads, and showed no respect whatever for the local people or their culture, traditions or sensitivities as they went about massacring innocent men, women and children (the death toll is nearing a million Iraqis but no one seems to care; the only figure that matters is US fatalities, which recently crossed the three thousand mark and is mounting by the day).

The atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib prison have become a faint, distant memory, with only a few low-ranking soldiers paying the price while every one up the totem pole of authority escaped retribution for complicity or command failure. Slowly and steadily the Iraqi resistance has risen from the ashes, and has become so potent that the only viable option left for the US and British forces is to declare a big victory and then hastily pack up and scoot. No amount of additional forces, the “surge” in troop levels that Bush has recently been talking about, is going to make a wee bit of a difference. The writing on the wall is clear: quit while you still can with a semblance of order and dignity, unless you are planning on a Vietnam-like exit from the rooftops of the US Embassy by helicopter.

The US has obviously not learnt any lessons from Vietnam, whose soldiers, and the Viet Cong, were held in very low esteem by GI Joe, and were referred to as “pyjama-clad gooks”. The “gooks” held out against the mightiest military of the world for years on end, till the tide finally turned in their favour, and then routed the most formidable army of the richest country in the world.

It took the US military a long time to recover from the trauma, till it invaded hapless Grenada on a flimsy excuse, and then ventured into Somalia under the glare of the television camera lights. The lowly Somalis, fighting for their country, shot down a US Black Hawk helicopter, and a rescue operation was launched to save the crew. The Americans walked into an ambush, and had to call for help from the UN Peacekeepers.

Pakistan’s 7th Frontier Force battalion responded, and rescued the Americans after themselves suffering several dead and wounded casualties. In no time Clinton pulled out his boys, leaving Somalia to its fate. (The Americans are fishing again in Somalia’s troubled waters, but this time through a surrogate from Ethiopia, to secure their interests in the Horn of Africa)

Ditto for Afghanistan: the “rag tag Taliban” have rebounded back with a vengeance after the initial pounding from the USAF’s Daisy Cutters and Bunker Busters. Time and the terrain are on their side; so is history, as the British know full well. Pakistan cannot be blamed for the woes of Karzai and the NATO forces, and if you know what is good for them, they should quit while they can.

The contempt for the enemy (i.e. India) syndrome has afflicted the Pakistan military too for a long time, forgetting the fact that the Indian and Pakistani forces were part of the same armed forces with similar fighting traditions till 1947. The Indian soldier was contemptuously referred to as a dal-khor bania (lentil-eating moneylender) while we prided ourselves as a superior meat-eating warrior nation.

Flushed with pride in the wake of what really was a very minor operation in the Rann of Kutch in early 1965, we dreamt of marching on Delhi and raising the Pakistani flag on the Red Fort as we sat out the hot summer of 1965 in the field, with no senior officer ever talking any sense to us brash youngsters. (My late friend Rana Bilal and I got a good dressing down from the CO when we once suggested over lunch that the Indian soldier might have some fighting qualities too and that we shouldn’t take him very lightly). With barely six infantry and one and a half armoured divisions (6 Armoured Div being nothing more than the old 100 Armoured Brigade Group which I joined on getting commissioned in 1962) we deluded ourselves into thinking that we would easily overrun the much larger Indian forces.

The Indians played from a different sheet of music, and the rest is history. No lessons were learnt, and then we found ourselves mired in East Pakistan. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the conflict, the despised Bengali Mukti Bahini were no walkover as they fought tooth and nail for their freedom, and won the day with the support of the “lala.” One thing is beyond dispute: our generals sitting in Rawalpindi were well and truly out-generaled by their Indian counterparts, and we ended up losing half the country, notwithstanding the bravery of the Pakistani rank and file. As B.H. Liddell-Hart said, “Wars are won and lost in the minds of the generals, not in the bodies of their men.”

We still learnt no lessons: addressing the students of the 1981 Armed Forces War Course in which General Musharraf was then a student, the then CGS emphatically said that one Pakistani soldier is equal to ten Indian soldiers, forgetting the old adage that “God is on the side of the bigger battalions,” while faith and hope are not cogent factors in military planning. Several years later we got embroiled in Kargil, conveniently forgetting that the Indians were not ever going to give up an inch of what they consider to be their territory without a stiff fight, come what may. After the initial setbacks and intelligence failures, they threw everything into getting the heights vacated in Kargil, and seemed willing to spread the scope of the conflict to the international border, and even to indulge in nuclear brinkmanship.

The result was that Nawaz Sharif had to dash off to Washington DC, hat in hand, to beg Clinton to broker a ceasefire; the captured heights, held at the cost of heavy loss of life, had to be vacated. He paid the price for his follies soon thereafter.
The moral of the story? Those who invade other people’s land and underestimate the resolve of the enemy to resist the occupation do so at their own grave peril. People of occupied lands, when well led and motivated, will fight to the last man to win back their country for the grasp of the occupier, no matter what.

Well said!

 

[blain2]

The official figures quoted for the economic aid go something like this.

1980-1990 .. 3.1 billion economic aid, 2.2 billion military aid.

1990-1999 .. 0.5 billion economic aid, 5 million military aid

1999-2007 .. 10.6 billion in BOTH economic and military aid.

From the 1999-2007 package, 6 billion has gone towards coalition support (CSFs), 2 billion on security, and around 2.5 billion to the government and development projects. You can see that the majority of the aid, will not have gone into the economy even from here. You can argue that 2.5 billion has been spent on the economy, which is nothing compared to the 100 billion growth in the economy that has occurred. From somewhere 97 billion extra dollars have been generated, which is larger than the whole economies under BB and NS. It's a statistical imposibility that these aid packages have contributed one bit to Pakistan's economic improvements.

$10.6 in aid???

The only aid here is $1.6 billion. The rest is what is owed to Pakistan for the logistics involved in keeping US and ISAF troops supplied in Afghanistan.