A former Pakistan Air Force officer, Air Marshal Masood Akhtar, has called on the West to provide his country with modern weapons for counter-insurgency and to avoid collateral damage.
He was speaking at a seminar on 'The Role of Air Power in Counter-Insurgency--Pakistan's Experience in the Tribal Region', at the International Institute of Strategic Studies here on Thursday evening. He said that Pakistan’s forces are battling against Taliban insurgency in the tribal areas in NWFP in which PAF is also playing an important role.
16 February 2008: APP
A former Pakistan Air Force officer, Air Marshal Masood Akhtar, has called on the West to provide his country with modern weapons for counter-insurgency and to avoid collateral damage.
He was speaking at a seminar on 'The Role of Air Power in Counter-Insurgency--Pakistan's Experience in the Tribal Region', at the International Institute of Strategic Studies here on Thursday evening. He said that Pakistan’s forces are battling against Taliban insurgency in the tribal areas in NWFP in which PAF is also playing an important role.
However, he added that helicopters, rather than fixed-wing warplanes, have been found more useful in these hilly areas. Masood Akhtar, who has been a fighter pilot for 35 years with over 2500 hours of flying experience on a variety of PAF fighter and training aircraft, said that the Air Force had been using this air power with caution and restrain to prevent collateral damage.
He said he was of the view that precision-guided ammunitions were better suited for PAF requirement rather than thousand-pounder or 500-pound bombs, which cause greater collateral damage. "If we are provided with smaller and smarter bombs, we could easily avoid unintended damage to civilian life or property," he added.
For the air power to be successful in counter-insurgency, he observed that a lot depends on good ground intelligence because any wrong information could lead to unwarranted damage.
Air Marshal Masood, who also served as a Commandant, Air War College, noted that damage to civilian life and property had resulted in a backlash which was evident by the recent attacks on PAF personnel by the suicide bombers.
He also explained the circumstances which led to the rise of al Qaeda and Taliban and said that such extremists groups emerged as a result of the global politics in which Pakistan, willy-nilly, had been caught up with and was paying a heavy price.
The Air Marshal said that during Soviet Union's 10-year occupation of Afghanistan, PAF had brought down a dozen Soviet and Afghan air forces planes found in violation of Pakistan territory.
The retired Air Force officer said Pakistan was pushed into thinking itself as a citadel of Islam as a consequence of the Cold War, in which the West's primary motive was to defeat Communism of Soviet Union and stop its spread.
"As a result, the message of Founding Fathers Muhammad Ali Jinnah and poet-philosopher Allama Iqbal of a tolerant and egalitarian society with people enjoying equal social, political and economical rights and opportunities was set aside and lost."
He said that both Osama Bin Laden and Mulla Omar had used globalisation to the hilt and achieved their objectives. He stressed the need for launching political, economic and social campaigns in the tribal areas to win the hearts and minds of the people and wean them from extremist ideology.
Masood called for overhauling the education system in Pakistan with greater focus on providing effective primary education to replace religious seminaries. "Only a well established and efficient unified education system could provide the basis and sense of a nationhood." he asserted.
He pointed out the difficulties of fighting an enemy without a face and said that Pakistan would have to fight such non-state factors for a long time. Responding to questions, he said there was a reluctance on the part of the West to give Pakistan sophisticated weapons, while the country is averse to allowing Nato troops to operate inside its borders.
In the current regional scenario, he noted, India has behaved sensibly and has not tried to take advantage of Pakistan's predicament. The Air Marshal said that both Pakistan and India have realised that military was no solution to the Kashmir issue and have started the peace process. The meeting was chaired by a former RAF bomber pilot Andrew Brookes, an IISS Aerospace analyst.
