Pak may get more US choppers, F-16s

‘‘This night vision goggles, it is done,’’ Powell told Senator Ernest Hollings, a member of the subcommittee. To a question on the supply of Mirages (presumably meaning American built F-16s and not French Mirages) Powell said ‘‘well, they hadn’t signed the (requisite papers)… They have now… We’re working on it. Yeah.’’

Pakistan had on Sunday admitted that it’s forces were getting technical help from the US Army. ‘‘We do have US Cobra helicopters but they are piloted by the Pakistanis and not by the Americans,’’ Pakistan Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed.

Meanwhile, the Defence News weekly quoted a defence analyst John E. Carbaugh as saying that there is a possibility of Pakistan now getting F-16s — which can carry nuclear weapons ‘‘with the slightest modification which any carpenter can do’’ as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it in Congress — to its new status as a major non-NATO ally (MNNA).

He quotes a US military analyst he does not name, as saying that ‘‘although the MNNA status is largely symbolic, it allows easier military cooperation and puts Pakistan into elite company.

‘‘It will be used by the US as incentive to coax increased cooperation from Islamabad in the ongoing fight against Al Qaeda and Taliban militants in the Pakistan-Afghan border region,’’ he writes.