We have delivered the F-16s to Pakistan and promise to deliver F18s to India. Fair enough, good business for us, we would say and would also ensure parity between the two nuclear enabled neighbors. But then what if the present Musharraf regime is overthrown and is replaced by a general openly sympathetic towards the Jihadis. There are many pro-Jihadi generals in the Pakistani military establishment.

The father of Pakistan’s A-bomb (the Islamic bomb) AQ Khan is also a known Jihadi sympathizer, with antipathy towards the West and especially the US. What if such elements take over. What if the pro-Jihadi MMM wins the next elections. Perhaps both these scenarios need to be prefixed not with “What if” but with “When”. And when one of these scenarios become a reality, our F16s would be in hands that would want to harm the US in particular, and the West in general.

So how do we than get back the F16s or make them dysfunctional, so that they are used against American interests. Our experience of the use of the heat seeking Stinger missiles against us, by the Taliban, who inherited those weapons from the Mujahideen to whom we had given the Stingers to bring down Soviet aircraft, should tell us the quagmire we are getting into by arming a nation, who is a potential enemy for us Americans. And when we tried to get back the Stingers from the Talibs, in return for a handsome buy-back price, what we got in return were sneers and eventually 9/11.

We shared with the Muhjahideen a common enemy – the Soviets. But then in spite of the enmity of the Mujahideen with the Soviets, we forgot to remember the more sustaining enmity which the Mujahideen had with all Westerners. An enmity that survived the fall of the Soviet regime, and then the Mujahideen (now in the Taliban vintage) turned our weapons against us. Now what is the guarantee that tomorrow the Musharraf regime will be replaced with a regime in Pakistan that would use the nuclear-enabled F16s against us? The think tanks at the Pentagon, have some deep thinking to do on this about the long term sagacity of arming a Islamic state.

History tells us that deep in the past when Islam first burst out of Arabia, the two competing powers the Sassanids and the Byzantines failed to recognize the danger that Islam presented to both of them, they failed to unite and lost out one after the other to the Muslim Arabs who had a single-minded determination to defeat and destroy all non-Muslim nations. The same psychology has been at work in the Muslim minds for 1400 years and the very same psychology to destroy all non-Muslims is at work in the Jihadis of today, be then in the Al Qaeda or in the Pakistani Military establishment, whom we have sharper teeth with our F16s.

The irony is that while we supply Pakistan with the most lethal weapons, we ask our citizens not to visit Pakistan, since the conditions there are unsafe for Americans!