The Foreign Office is rejecting claims by an American news website that Pakistan secretly sold arms to Ukraine in return for US support in getting the recent IMF bailout approved. The Intercept had also made a softer version of the same claims earlier, in a report on the Imran Khan cypher saga that appeared to reproduce verbatim the claims made by the imprisoned PTI chief. This new report also ties to the PTI’s rubbished claims that the no-confidence vote had anything to do with Imran’s Russia policy or US interference.
It is also worth noting that even the ‘smoking gun’ in the report is that Pakistan may have legally sold weapons to a US-based and American-owned arms dealer. That dealer is among the Ukrainian military’s weapons suppliers, and it is feasible that they may have sold Pakistani weapons to Ukraine. This transaction would also be legal under US law, but may conflict with Pakistan’s neutrality policy on the war. But while this may qualify as an illegal secondary sale, it could easily be circumvented by rerouting supplies between different buyers — for example, by sending Pakistani ammunition to a country that Pakistan allows arms exports to, and sending other ammunition originally destined for that country to Ukraine. Another legal workaround comes at the state level, where countries may export their own ‘excess stocks’ without informing the original suppliers unless an explicit agreement is in place — such as the ones we have regarding F-16s.
All of the Pakistan watchers quoted in the report found it hard to believe that arms movement could be a precondition for the IMF deal, and Ukrainian officials have consistently denied receiving arms from Pakistan, with some actually noting how helpful it would be if this were not the case. Even the report contradicts its own claims by noting that the IMF issues public accounting of its reviews, which would be problematic, to say the least, if they had to detail a covert arms export operation in those documents.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 20th, 2023.
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