‘Pakistan may have surprised India with its hardware, technical abilities’

BRITISH security and defence analyst Prof Michael Clarke said on Saturday that Pakistanis may have surprised Indians with their hardware and their technical abilities.

Speaking to Sky News, he said India would take Pakistan’s robustness as risk-taking.

Prof Clarke said the Indians might have been surprised by the hardware that the Pakistanis brought to bear, because as we’re now discovering they’ve used quite a lot of their Chinese-based technology, and the attention at the moment is focused on the J-10 fighter.”

He said that it looks as if one of the J-10s may have brought down one of the Rafale fighters, the French fighters that the Indian side uses. And undoubtedly, he added, the Pakistanis have used their HQ-9, anti-aircraft missiles, which again may have been rather effective.

“So I think the Indians might have been surprised by the technical abilities that Pakistan seems to have absorbed with their Chinese equipment, but they won’t have been surprised by the bellicosity of [Gen Asim] Munir because they rather expected that.”

He also said that partly, India’s response has been to try to, as it were, teach (Gen) Munir a lesson that they really are prepared to do whatever it takes, and indeed they’ve deployed a carrier battle group of their Western fleet.

“It’s sitting only 300 miles off Karachi, which is a sort of threat to go in for a more general war, unless the Pakistanis found a way of backing down from this position. Unfortunately, the international community has given them a line that they can both top out at.”

He said both sides have agreed to a ceasefire which has been pushed so hard and, to its credit, by the Trump administration and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. However, he said, they (the US administration) were rather late in getting on this, as this thing had been going on since Tuesday but now it seems their words have made a difference.