Check out this story in Dawn, on Pakistan buying more toys from the Chinese:

BEIJING: Pakistan has confirmed it will buy Chinese missiles and flight systems to equip its 250 JF-17 Thunder jet fighters as it seeks to deepen military cooperation with Beijing, state media said Thursday.

Rao Qamar Suleman, air chief marshal of the Pakistan Air Force, told the Global Times newspaper Chinese radar systems and SD-10 mid-range homing missiles would be used on the fighters co-developed by the two nations.

“PAF has no plans to install Western devices and weapons on the aircraft for the time being,” the newspaper quoted Suleman as saying.

Pakistan may also buy up to four Chinese surface-to-air missiles, as it seeks stronger cooperation with China to help upgrade its armed forces, Suleman told the China Daily in a separate interview.

Wonderful. By the way, the story makes absolutely no mention of the actual price tag of these new toys. It does, however, mention that this development is occuring because Pakistan was originally going to buy toys from France before the latter balked (the story implies that “not pissing off India” was the cause of France balking but I wonder if this has anything to do with it). The cost of the original deal with France is mentioned: about a billion and a half dollars. A billion and a half! Assuming the China deal is a somewhat close substitute of the France deal, then we can deduce that Pakistan just bought some toys that are priced at THREE TIMES the demand by the UN to fund initial flood relief efforts.

Again, just to be clear:

Cost of toys from China (give or take) = $1.6 billion

Cost of initial flood relief efforts as estimated by the UN =  $459 million

Now, I may have dropped from a math major to a math minor at college, but something about those numbers seems off to me. Just a hunch.

I’ve said it a gazillion times before and I will say it a gazillion additional times: trying to keep up with India’s pace of military advancement is crazy. Foolish. Nuts. Dumb. Stupid. Just all out strategic suicide. And if you want to understand why, please look at this graph, which will save me (according to folklore) a full thousand words:

That, my friends, is a chart of the respective GDPs of India and Pakistan over time. If by some miracle you happen to be someone at GHQ while reading this post, please stare very hard at that picture and remember what it looks like next time you’re making an important decision about anything. And keep in mind that the gap isn’t about to close any time soon; see this graph to compare growth rates and the extent to which India has outperformed Pakistan economically for the best part of two decades.

The crazy thing for me about all this is that Pakistan’s security is essentially guaranteed vis-a-vis India by its 100 (or so) nuclear warheads. It’s called nuclear deterrence. So why are wasting literally billions of dollars on stuff that adds very little marginal security to Pakistan? And keep in mind that this is just one purchase of many — no one knows exactly how much we spend on toys we don’t need because there is little financial oversight of what our military is up to.

One final note: people often (rightly) complain about this foreign trip by Zardari or that hotel our politicians and their zoo-like entourages stay in or whatever. As unseemly and wasteful as those episodes are, they absolutely pale in comparison to this stuff. How much could you possibly spend on a helicopter ride to a French chateau or a fancy hotel in New York? Hundreds of thousands of dollars? Millions of dollars? Surely no more than that? By contrast, the cost of toys we don’t need are a full order of magnitude higher. The scale of such waste, I hope, is kept in mind when we bitch and moan about what our ruling class is up to.

Blast from the past: This post, titled “What are Pakistan’s nuclear weapons for?” is sort of related to the issue at hand here.

UPDATE/Correction: An earlier version of this post had $459 million as the entire cost of the flood relief efforts; in actual fact that was the figure given by the UN for initial flood relief efforts. Thanks to reader Mohcin for pointing this out.