StrategyPage has an update on the latest snag affecting post-quake relief efforts in Pakistan –

Under pressure from Islamic conservative politicians, Pakistan agreed to get [out] NATO troops, performing relief work in the earthquake zone, within 90 days. There are about a thousand NATO troops involved in the relief operations. The Islamic conservatives find this very embarrassing, with all those infidel (non-Moslem) soldiers in a Moslem country. Many conservative clerics are preaching that it is better to suffer and die from privation, than to tolerate infidel soldiers in your neighborhood. Thousands of people in the earthquake zone face death, as the brutal Winter weather has closed in. The NATO troops have the most helicopters and other high tech gear to get aid to people who need it most. European governments are trying to get civilian specialists into the area, to replace the departing troops.

These pressures are the same reason last weekend’s Predator strike on a senior Al Qaeda leader was initially pitched by the Pakistani’s as the product of a bungled bomb –

Pakistan declared that Harethi died when a bomb he was assembling went off. But people in the are displayed missile fragments, including data plates that said “AGM-114.” That’s a Hellfire missile, normally fired from CIA Predator UAVs known to operate in the area. The Pakistani government does not like to admit it allows the CIA to fly armed UAVs freely around Pakistan, but it does.

Tis a delicate dance when you’re barely sovereign over your own country & don’t want to admit that others (infidels, no less) are in there cleaning up your mess. Pakistani newspapers do seem to be talking pretty readily about the big secret –

“For their part, it is not surprising that the Pakistanis would deny that Rabia was taken out by a US missile. Although the government of Pakistani President Gen Pervez Musharraf is one of Washington’s most valuable allies in the war on terrorism, anti-American sentiment in the country runs high. Public acknowledgement that US drones are operating over Pakistan and launching missiles could direct that sentiment toward Musharraf,” he points out.

In the meantime, it appears that Amartya Sen’s dictum that the ultimate source of modern hunger is politics, not poverty may find a sad new proofpoint.

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And now a followup to one of the most vehemently commented old Sepia Mutiny posts – the annual fighter war games between the USAF and IAF. This year brought a new set of games and apparently a similar result –

Mingling over a few rounds of golf, dogfighting a bit over the jungles of West Bengal – this month’s Cope India 2005 war games were billed as a standard two-week exercise between Indian and American top guns.

…The exercises had mixed teams of Indian and American pilots on both sides, which means that both the Americans and the Indians won, and lost. Yet, observers say that in a surprising number of encounters – particularly between the American F-16s and the Indian Sukhoi-30 MKIs – the Indian pilots came out the winners.

“Since the cold war, there has been the general assumption that India is a third-world country with Soviet technology, and wherever the Soviet-supported equipment went, it didn’t perform well,” says Jasjit Singh, a retired air commodore and now director of the Center for Air Power Studies in New Delhi. “That myth has been blown out by the results” of these air exercises.

Predictably, chauvinists of all stripes were pulled out of the woodwork –

…during Cope India ’05, Bharat Rakshak was a veritable cheering session for the underestimated Indian Air Force.

Typical was a posting by a blogger who called himself “Babui.” Citing a quote from a US Air Force participant in Cope India ’05 in Stars and Stripes – “We try to replicate how these aircraft perform in the air, and I think we’re good at doing that in our Air Force, but what we can’t replicate is what’s going on in their minds. They’ve challenged our traditional way of thinking on how an adversary, from whichever country, would fight.” – “Babui” wrote, “That quote is as good an admission that the F-16 jocks got their clocks cleaned.”

…an American pilot who participated in the exercise, added his own two cents on the blog. “It makes me sick to see some of the posts on this website,” wrote a purported US “Viper” pilot. “They made some mistakes and so did we…. That’s what happens and you learn from it.”

Oh yeah? Well mine’s bigger than yours. Manish previously covered the new SU-30’s the Indian team fielded for the games. An impressive piece of machinery indeed and certainly an impetus for next generation F35’s and F22’s.

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