With his decision to sell 24 F-16 fighter planes to Pakistan, President Bush has taken the gamble of using weapons sales as rewards or incentives for Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s cooperation on matters that appear to be more important to the administration than stability on the Asian subcontinent. In the late 1980s, Pakistan paid for an earlier version of the F-16 but saw delivery of the planes prohibited by the 1990 Pressler amendment. This history is crucial to understanding the significance Pakistan attaches to the sale of advanced F-16s that Bush made public Friday. If there were less danger of these planes fuelling a destabilising arms race between India and Pakistan, the sale might be justifiable as a way of making up for Washington’s shabby treatment of Pakistan in the recent past. But weapon sale have more to do with US anxiety about Iran’s nuclear progra-mme than with rectifying indignities inflicted on Pakistan. From Pakistan, the US monitors Iran’s nuclear activities. Musharraf has helped US on different occasions. In return, Bush approved the sale of $1.3 billion of military items. The talk of offering other kinds of advanced weaponry to India to balance the sale of F-16s to Pakistan amounts to the dangerous stoking of an arms race between nuclear powers that need peace and economic development more than they need weapons. — The Boston Globe