Pakistan is considering buying used F-16 fighter jets from Jordan after a plan to buy eight of the aircraft from the United States fell through because of the refusal of the US Congress to finance the deal, media reported on Tuesday.
Some of Pakistan’s fleet of F-16 jets is due to be decommissioned in the next few years and the government says it needs the aircraft to fight militants in remote mountains near Afghanistan. The military also sees the aircraft as vital in case of any possible war considering the volatile situation in the region.
“We are now going for a third-party transfer of F-16s and have an offer from Jordan,” Defence Secretary Alam Khattak told a joint sitting of the Senate defence and foreign affairs committees on Monday, media reported. An air force spokesman declined to say how many F-16s Pakistan has but the number of the aircraft in service is believed to be about 70. Jordan had offered to sell Pakistan 16 used F-16s of the Block-30 variant, an older version than the Block-52s that Pakistan would have obtained from the US, sources reported.
The US deal was valued at $699 million and came unstuck after the US Congress refused to authorise the use of US government funds to pay for the aircraft under the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) programme. Members of the US Congress led by Republican Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Corker demanded that Pakistan increases efforts to eradicate militant groups like the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani Network, which are leading an insurgency against a US-backed government in Kabul. Pakistan said that it is acting against the militants, citing military operations in lawless ethnic Pashtun lands that border Afghanistan. Pakistan also said the F-16s are essential for that fight with their precision strike ability and night-flying capability.
The difficulty over the F-16 deal was the latest sign of increasingly frayed ties between Pakistan and the US. Last month, a US drone killed Mullah Akhtar Mansour the then chief of the Afghan Taliban on Pakistani soil. Pakistan condemned the strike as a violation of its sovereignty and not being unfavorable towards encouraging the Taliban to enter talks with the Afghan government. Pakistan had bought Jordanian F-16s before, procuring 13 of them in 2014, sources said. The current batch on offer was manufactured between 1988 and 1990 and was upgraded in 2001/02.
