Should the West Arm Pakistan?

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan has thrust upon the Carter Administration a question whose answer is not as obvious as it seems: whether--and to what extent--to arm Pakistan. The U.S. suspended both military and economic assistance to Islamabad in April 1979, after concluding that Pakistan was secretly engaged in building a uranium-enrichment plant capable of making atomic bomb materials. That cutoff was required under U.S. laws aimed at preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. Furthermore, Washington has reason to worry about the longevity in office of Pakistan's President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq. Ever since he seized power 18 months ago, Zia has been promising to hold general elections--and then changing his mind. His martial-law regime is repressive, unpopular and potentially unstable.

Despite Zia's drawbacks as a leader. Carter Administration policymakers have concluded that Pakistan must be strengthened in order to discourage the possibility of a Soviet thrust from Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass. Zia has an exalted sense of how much strengthening is needed. When he heard last month that Carter was thinking of providing $400 million in military aid, he petulantly rejected the offer as "peanuts." Just how much Zia thinks he deserves is not yet known, but State Department officials have hinted at a Western aid pack, age of $1.5 billion, including the originally specified $400 million from the U.S. Other donors would include Britain, West Germany, Japan and Saudi Arabia.

The object would not be to safeguard Pakistan against an all-out Soviet attack. As Defense Secretary Harold Brown put it last week, that is "not something the Pakistanis themselves would be able to cope with no matter how much equipment they have."

Rather, the aim would be to allow Pakistan to fend off minor Soviet border incursions and to control its own ethnic separatists in case Moscow should try to foment rebellions among these minorities.

Selig Harrison, a Southwest Asia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argues that the U.S. should encourage the Zia regime to try to placate these minority groups--for instance, by granting a measure of autonomy to the Baluchs of southwestern Pakistan. During a 1973-77 rebellion, Harrison recalls, the Pakistan air force used Iranian-supplied U.S. helicopters to raze Baluch villages indiscriminately, thereby unleashing "a legacy of hatred that has merely intensified separatist feelings." Recently, however, some Baluch leaders have told U.S. diplomats that they are worried about the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, and would settle for regional autonomy rather than independence from Islamabad.

British military analysts believe that Western aid to Pakistan should be limited to defensive equipment. The Islamabad government covets some of the most sophisticated weapons in the American arsenal, including F-15 and A-7 fighters, but it is not likely to get them. That kind of equipment would be a direct provocation to India, which might then feel obliged to seek Moscow's help in modernizing its armory. British experts also feel that the Western allies should not become involved in smuggling arms to the Afghan rebels. A far safer course would be to leave that task either to China or to the sympathetic Islamic states that condemned Soviet actions at the Islamabad foreign ministers' conference. U.S. officials say that they have no plans to help the rebels directly, on the sensible ground that the guerrillas have no chance against the Soviets.

The U.S., with the support of its allies, would presumably be prepared to go to war with the U.S.S.R. over the Persian Gulf, which supplies 60% of the West's oil. A Soviet attack on Pakistan would be something else; it would, and should, be costly, from Moscow's point of view, but would not necessarily lead to American or British intervention. Thus Washington's present intention is to help Zia ward off Soviet border forays rather than arm Pakistan against a Soviet invasion--an eventuality that Western strategists do not think likely.

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