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| India-Pakistan |
| Pakistan denies it altered US-made missiles |
| 2009-08-31 |
| [Dawn] Pakistan rejected accusations its army illegally modified American-made missiles to increase its land-strike capability, denying Sunday that it reconfigured anti-ship weapons in a way that could target India. The denial was in response to a news report that the Obama administration made a diplomatic protest to Pakistan's prime minister over the alleged alterations to the anti-ship missiles Islamabad bought in the 1980s. Nuclear-armed Pakistan is a key US ally in fighting the Taliban and hunting down al-Qaida terrorist leaders along its north-western border with Afghanistan. However, it's aggressive weapons development and antagonistic relations with giant neighbour India, also a nuclear power, have raised concerns of an arms race. A statement from Pakistan's Foreign Ministry said Sunday that it 'categorically rejected' the article in The New York Times saying that Harpoon anti-ship missiles had been modified and that they could pose a potential threat to giant rival India. The newspaper cited senior Obama administration and congressional officials as saying the allegation first surfaced in June in an unpublicized diplomatic protest to Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani. Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to the US, also denied the report. 'The accusations are incorrect and based on wrong intelligence,' Haqqani said in a report carried by the state-run news agency, Associated Press of Pakistan. The Harpoon missiles were sold to Pakistan by the Reagan administration decades ago as defensive weapons. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #6 Y'all seem to have missed that the "No Sarc Tag" was a joke as well. Sorry, too subtle for ya? |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2009-08-31 23:32 |
| #5 Here at the 'burg, the sarc tags are implicit. Given that we have evolved the Harpoon from its original anti-ship role into a land attack version (SLAM), it obviously can be done. I suspect the Pak denial lies more in the details than the act itself. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2009-08-31 20:33 |
| #4 And I believe them. If I'd wrote it, it would be believable with or without the /sarc tag. g(r)omgoru tends toward overly cynical rather than naive, in my experience. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2009-08-31 19:56 |
| #3 A sarc tag would completely suck the humor out of that one-liner |
| Posted by: sludge 2009-08-31 17:18 |
| #2 Ummm you forgot the sarc tag. |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2009-08-31 14:58 |
| #1 And I believe them. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2009-08-31 04:11 |