India-US dogfight over downing of Pakistani F-16 gets complicated

WASHINGTON: The political and diplomatic dogfight over whether India downed a Pakistani F-16 following the

Balakot

air strike got more complicated on Friday after the Indian Air Force insisted it had evidence to this effect in the face of the United States saying its physical verification of Pakistani F-16s showed all of them accounted for.


The US inventory check, conducted several days after the Balakot strike at Pakistan’s invitation, showed no missing F-16s, including those Islamabad bought from third party suppliers, according to

Foreign Policy

magazine citing senior US defense officials and analysts. The officials said some of the F-16s were not immediately available for inspection due to the conflict, so it took US personnel several weeks to account for all the jets.

But the IAF maintained it had “electronic signatures” and sightings among evidence that it had hit an F-16. "During the aerial engagement, one MiG 21 Bison of the IAF shot down an F-16 in the Nowshera Sector. The two sightings were at places separated by at least 8-10 km. One was an IAF MiG 21 Bison and other a PAF aircraft. Electronic signatures gathered by us indicate that the PAF aircraft was a F-16,” it said in a statement contesting the US account.

The IAF assertion left open the possibility that Pakistan could have lost an F-16 bought from third-party sources (it got some from Jordan) that was not part of the US-supplied inventory or that it managed to patch together enough F-16s to somehow hoodwink the US inspectors, scenarios American analysts consider unlikely. Even F-16s acquired through third-party transfer are subject to the end-user agreement… to try to ensure its equipment does not fall into the hands of “hostile actors,” aerospace analyst Richard Aboulafia told the journal.

A few experts also wondered if the US was covering up an F-16 loss for “commercial/pride reasons.” But other analysts discount such a possibility. “Let me just say that Pakistan has many enemies in the US bureaucracy and even more on the Hill, and I think if Pakistan lost an F-16 they would gleefully leak it,” one US commentator wrote on social media.

The IAF assertion that its fighter jet had hit a Pakistani F-16s was backed by defense minister Nirmala Sitharaman who said in a subsequent interview, "We are definitely saying that an F-16 was knocked out by us and initially, the Pakistan Prime Minister claimed that two pilots were with them. One of the pilots was ours and returned as per the norms. Who is the other pilot?"

Foreign Policy’s defense correspondent had another explanation for the Indian claim. "It is possible that in the heat of combat, Varthaman (the Indian pilot), flying a vintage MiG-21 Bison, got a lock on the Pakistani F-16, fired, and genuinely believed he scored a hit," she conjectured, before concluding, "But the count, conducted by US authorities on the ground in Pakistan, sheds doubt on New Delhi’s version of events, suggesting that Indian authorities may have misled the international community about what happened that day."

But the broader conclusion in the foreign policy community was that Indian overreach had met its comeuppance. In other words, rather than getting into the specifics of how many terrorists were killed in the Balakot incursion and bombing and whether it downed a Pakistani jet, New Delhi should have simply expressed its intent by pointing that it had crossed Pakistani red lines by penetrating deep into the country.

Foreign Policy also highlighted another setback to New Delhi from the episode. Apparently, when the incident occurred, India asked the US government to investigate whether Pakistan’s use of the F-16 against India violated the terms of the foreign military sale agreements.

However, a US defense official who spoke about the incident said the agreement with Pakistan did not involve any terms limiting the use of the F-16s. "It would be incredibly naive for us to believe that we could sell some type of equipment to Pakistan that they would not intend to use in a fight," the official told the journal.

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