Arms Sales: Life-and-Death Issue Gets Less-Than-Keen Attention in Congress

Another day in Washington, another arms deal in Congress.

One of the most astonishing things to watch in the nation’s capital these days is the offhand, almost casual way in which Congress dispenses with matters that can mean war or peace, life or death in remote corners of the Earth.

Consider international arms sales. In the post-Cold War era of tight budgets, supplying arms is one of the main ways in which America exerts its influence around the world. There is no longer enough money for Marshall plans. Congress is cutting back what little remains of foreign aid. The days of Graham Greene’s “Quiet American,” when covert CIA agents ran secret wars, seem to be in decline too.

But the country still has arms to sell--indeed, more of them than ever, and high-tech weaponry is often what other countries want most.

The figures tell the story. In 1994, America sold $12 billion in weapons to the rest of the world, nearly four times as much as Germany, which last year for the first time vaulted past Russia to take second place among arms exporters. Over the past five years, the United States sold nearly $63 billion in arms, far more than the next-biggest exporter, Russia, with $22 billion.

Slightly over half of the American arms sales still go to industrialized countries, such as NATO allies and Japan. But the United States wins the leading share of the market among developing nations. According to the Congressional Research Service, the United States ranked first in arms exports to developing nations from 1987 to 1994, just ahead of Russia (or the Soviet Union), and more than double the sales of France, Britain or China.

Rarely do these American arms transfers attract much interest in Washington.

Last Thursday, for instance, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took up a Clinton Administration proposal to send $368 million in military equipment to Pakistan. The arms deal is eagerly sought by Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and just as avidly opposed by India.

Together, India and Pakistan represent about 1 billion people, roughly one-fifth of the Earth’s population. They have, respectively, the world’s second- and eighth-largest armies. If you ask experts on nuclear weapons where nuclear war might conceivably break out, a war between Pakistan and India is invariably the top candidate on their lists.

Both nations have well-advanced nuclear weapons programs. Neither has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would allow inspection of their nuclear plants. The two countries already have gone to war several times in the past, and relations remain tense.

Those facts alone might seem to merit the time of members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Yet when the committee held its hearing, only two of the 18 members of the committee showed up. Administration officials in charge of South Asia policy testified for the first time in half a year, but they were talking mostly to empty chairs.

In the context of Washington, this sort of inattention is not particularly unusual or surprising. India and Pakistan aren’t at the top of America’s foreign policy agenda. The leading officials in the State Department and the National Security Council are busy dealing with Bosnia, China and Russia.

On Capitol Hill, on the day of the hearing on India and Pakistan, senators were preoccupied with other, seemingly more pressing matters. The Senate was in the midst of a far-reaching debate on this country’s welfare programs.

If senators take arms transfers casually, it is because they deal with them all the time. Just last week, while the Pakistan package was pending, a delegation of senior officials from Taiwan was quietly making the rounds of Senate offices, seeking help to get tanks and air-defense radar as quickly as possible. During any given week, some country or another is lobbying Congress for U.S. weapons for itself, or against the sale of weapons to its neighbor.

The Clinton Administration has done little to curb the proliferation of arms sales. Indeed, one of the little-noticed ways in which President Clinton seems to be following the path of his model, President John F. Kennedy, is in his tolerance, indeed encouragement, of American arms sales.

“Kennedy saw clearly the linkage between defense and economics,” writes Richard Reeves in his history of the Kennedy Administration. “One of his first innovations as President had been to establish a bureau in the Pentagon to push the sales of U.S. weaponry around the world, as one way to improve the country’s foreign trade balance.”

A generation later, Clinton is at least equally eager for exports. Last February, after an 18-month study of what to do about arms transfers, Clinton rejected appeals to restrict American arms sales abroad. A policy statement reaffirmed that arms sales are a “legitimate instrument” of American foreign policy and that these sales are “deserving [of] U.S. government support.”

In some respects, Clinton went further than past presidents. The Administration’s policy statement on arms transfers explicitly acknowledged for the first time that the protection of American jobs and of the U.S. industrial base is a legitimate factor to be taken into account in deciding whether to approve a weapons sale.

Such a policy is certainly good for American defense companies. But it also creates difficulties for U.S. foreign policy by taking some of the steam out of the American argument that other countries should curb their arms exports.

It makes it harder, for example, for the Administration to tell Russia not to sell nuclear reactors to Iran. Russia’s defense industries, after all, are suffering a lot worse than the ones in this country.

While spending for arms is dropping in most other parts of the world, it is still going up in South Asia. According to the most recent report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, India’s arms purchases went up 12% and Pakistan’s went up by 19.5% between 1992 and 1994.

The equipment the Administration is now seeking to send to Pakistan includes three Orion maritime patrol aircraft, 28 Harpoon anti-ship missiles, missile components, rockets, howitzers, radar systems, explosives and assorted spare parts for F-16 warplanes and Cobra helicopters.

All of this hardware was first ordered by Pakistan more than five years ago, along with 28 F-16s. But the deal was held up when the United States imposed sanctions on Pakistan for proceeding with its nuclear weapons program.

Now, the Administration has decided to try to sell the warplanes elsewhere, possibly to the Philippines and Indonesia, but it wants a one-time-only waiver of the nuclear sanctions to let Pakistan obtain the rest of the arms package.

India has complained that this weapons package would threaten its security and intensify the arms race between it and Pakistan.

And the Administration understandably seems to be paying greater attention to what India thinks these days: It is the dominant nation in South Asia and, perhaps, one of the world’s leading powers of the 21st Century.

Yet at Thursday’s hearing, both Administration officials and several outside experts agreed that the American arms package would not significantly affect the overall balance of power between Pakistan and India.

Administration officials also give other reasons for wanting to go ahead with the arms deal. While warming up to India, they want to preserve some ties to Pakistan, which they hope could exert some influence over other nations in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Pakistan “is a large, moderate, Islamic democracy in a troubled region,” testified Assistant Secretary of State Robin L. Raphel to what was, by the time of her testimony, an audience of exactly one senator.

Maybe she should have saved her breath. When it comes to India and Pakistan, the members of the U.S. Senate don’t pay much attention to the details. Many of them will probably approve an arms transfer to one of the world’s true flash points--or, maybe, turn the deal down--based upon whim, lobbying and about 10 seconds of thought.

After all, when it comes to American arms sales, this one is just another drop in the bucket.

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Leading Weapon Suppliers

The United States is the leading supplier of major conventional weapons (in millions of 1990 U.S. dollars):

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Suppliers 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 U.S. 10,648 13,041 13,801 12,905 11,959 U.S.S.R./Russia 10,459 3,838 3,385 3,388 842 Germany 1,656 2,505 1,487 1,726 3,162 Britain 1,509 1,156 1,020 1,278 1,593 France 2,220 1,090 1,113 1,159 705 China 1,245 1,117 1,157 1,257 1,204 Netherlands 267 453 432 356 558 Italy 287 360 479 514 357 Czechoslovakia* 753 60 221 474 79 Switzerland 282 386 344 83 46 North Korea 0 138 86 420 43 Sweden 248 121 129 56 91 Yugoslavia 60 543 21 0 0 Canada 67 15 131 161 208 Ukraine - - 400 23 0

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Note: Rankings based on 1990-94 aggregate

*1990-92 data refer to the former Czechoslovakia; for 1993-94, the data refer to the Czech Republic

Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute