The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics Read online

  THE CHINA-PAKISTAN AXIS

  ANDREW SMALL

  The China-Pakistan Axis

  Asia’s New Geopolitics

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  Copyright © Andrew Small, 2015

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title Small, Andrew

  The China-Pakistan Axis

  Asia’s New Geopolitics

  ISBN 978-0-19-021075-5

  eISBN 978-0-19-025757-6

  CONTENTS

  Abbreviations

  Prologue: In the Shadow of the Red Mosque

  Introduction

  1. A Friendship Forged by War

  2. Nuclear Fusion

  3. Re-hyphenating India

  4. The Chinese War on Terror

  5. The Trade Across the Roof of the World

  6. Tea with the Taliban

  7. Lord, Make them Leave—But Not Yet

  Epilogue: The Dragon Meets the Lion

  Note on Sourcing

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  ABBREVIATIONS

  ANA Afghan National Army

  CENTO Central Treaty Organization

  CIA Central Intelligence Agency

  CICIR Chinese Institute of Contemporary International Relations

  CNPC China National Petroleum Corporation

  CPC also CCP, Communist Party of China

  ETIM East Turkistan Islamic Movement

  ETIP East Turkistan Islamic Party

  FATA Federally Administered Tribal Areas

  HIT Heavy Industries Taxila

  IAEA International Atomic Energy Agency

  IDCPC International Department, Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

  IED improvised explosive device

  ISI Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence

  IMF International Monetary Fund

  IMU Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan

  JI Jamaat-e-Islami

  JuD Jamaat-ud-Dawa

  JUI Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam

  JUI-F Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (Fazlur Rehman group)

  KGB Committee for State Security

  KKH Karakoram Highway

  LeT Lashkar-e-Taiba

  MCC China Metallurgical Group Corporation

  NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization

  NEO non-combatant evacuation operation

  NSA National Security Agency

  NSC National Security Council

  NSG Nuclear Suppliers Group

  NPT Non-Proliferation Treaty (Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons)

  OIC Organization of the Islamic Conference

  PLA People’s Liberation Army

  PLAN People’s Liberation Army Navy

  PML Pakistan Muslim League

  PML-Q Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid e Azam Group)

  PML-N Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz)

  POW prisoner of war

  PPP Pakistan People’s Party

  PRC People’s Republic of China

  PSA Port of Singapore Authority

  PTI Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf

  S&ED U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue

  SCO Shanghai Cooperation Organization

  SEATO Southeast Asia Treaty Organization

  SIGINT Signals Intelligence

  SSG Special Services Group

  TIP Turkistan Islamic Party

  TTP Tehrek-i-Taliban Pakistan

  UAV unmanned aerial vehicle

  UF6 uranium hexaflouride

  WTO World Trade Organization

  ZTE Zhongxing Telecommunication Equipment Organization

  PROLOGUE

  IN THE SHADOW OF THE RED MOSQUE1

  “The Pakistanis love China for what it can do for them, while the Chinese love Pakistanis despite what they do to themselves.”2

  In the early hours of Sunday, June 24 2007, vigilante groups from Lal Masjid, the Red Mosque, raided a Chinese massage parlour and acupuncture clinic in sector F-8, one of Islamabad’s wealthiest neighbourhoods.3 Overpowering three Pakistani guards, the militants, including ten burqa-clad women armed with batons, entered the house and demanded that the workers there accompany them. When the seven Chinese staff and two Pakistani clients refused, they were beaten and forcibly abducted. The “vice and virtue” squad took their victims to the Jamia Hafsa madrassa, a short distance from the clinic, where a spokesman announced to local press that “this place was used as a brothel house and despite our warnings the administration failed to take any action, so we decided to take action on our own.”4

  For the Lal Masjid radicals it was a serious tactical error. The same band of militants had been involved in a similar episode a few months earlier, when they rounded off their assault on another brothel by kidnapping four policemen. But the involvement of Chinese citizens made the June 24 incident far graver a matter. The treatment of China’s overseas nationals had become a subject of acute sensitivity for Beijing. In the eyes of the more assertive sections of the Chinese public it was a test of the Communist Party’s backbone, as the mocking packages of calcium pills they sent to the foreign ministry attested.5 The imprisonment of seven Chinese workers within spitting distance of the principal government institutions of a country that was supposed to be China’s closest ally was a matter of serious embarrassment. China’s president, Hu Jintao, would receive regular briefings from his diplomats in Pakistan as the drama of the next seventeen hours unfolded.6

  The kidnappings set in motion a fateful chain of events that resulted, within weeks, in a bloody denouement at the mosque, and the irrevocable altering of the relationship between Pakistan’s military and its militants. And while the showdown between the army and the extremist bastion in the nation’s capital had been looming for some time, few would have anticipated the country that provided the final trigger for the confrontation. Not the United States, whose efforts to push Islamabad to crack down on domestic militancy were so often outmanoeuvred, but Pakistan’s all-weather friend whose requests could not be ignored: China.

  For all the challenges that Pakistan faced, early in 2007 things seemed to be looking up. Annual growth ran at nearly 7
per cent.7 The inflow of foreign investment had doubled in each of the last three years,8 and the Karachi Stock Exchange was one of the world’s leading performers.9 Three years of secret talks with India had brought the two sides tantalisingly close to a deal over Kashmir.10 The strategic setback Pakistan faced in Afghanistan after 9/11, when it lost the government it had installed to a US invasion that it felt compelled to support, was being reversed by a resurgent Taliban. “Our boys”, as they were once openly described by Pakistan’s interior minister, had re-taken control over swathes of the south and east of Afghanistan.11 Even better: despite the insurgency being led, armed and financed from Pakistan, the relationship with the United States remained strong. Pervez Musharraf, the president and chief of army staff, had recently completed a visit-cum-book-tour of the United States with an itinerary that would make any American politician envious.12 His efforts to position Pakistan as a crucial ally in the war against global terrorism continued to bear fruit, not least in the flow of billions of dollars of military aid and vital arms transfers.

  China had its own part to play in this upbeat picture. The new port at Gwadar—which Chinese companies had built and mostly paid for—had just been inaugurated, promising “the next Dubai” on the Makran coast and an energy transshipment corridor running from the Arabian Sea through to China’s booming cities.13 Coupled with plans to expand the Karakoram Highway, which spans the high mountain passes in North-East Pakistan and North-West China, and a host of new telecommunications and mining investments, there was now hope that Pakistan’s prospects might be tied to China’s extraordinary economic expansion. Beijing was even there to cushion the blow of the US-India civil nuclear agreement, announced in 2005. Not only was there a prospect of China giving Pakistan a matching deal—the expansion of the Chashma nuclear power plants—but the US-India move seemed to mark the end of any temptation for Beijing to take a more balanced approach in its relations with its two South Asian neighbours. Residual Pakistani anxieties about China being lured away by India’s economic boom were instead superseded by the prospect of consolidating a new axis with the emerging superpower.

  But a time-bomb was ticking in the heart of Pakistan’s capital. Lal Masjid and the Jamia Hafsa madrassa are located only a few blocks from the Presidential Palace, and even closer to the headquarters of Pakistan’s military intelligence service, the ISI. The first mosque to be built when Islamabad was established as the seat of government in Karachi’s place, it had long been frequented by the city’s senior generals and politicians.14 Yet in the years leading up to 2007, it became the epicentre of Pakistan’s fraught relationship with the extremist forces that its army both sympathised with and feared, part directed and part struggled to control. Lal Masjid’s ties with militants were longstanding, but in the past those links had been largely state-supported. In the 1980s, the mosque acted as an important recruiting post for mujahideen in the anti-Soviet campaign, and welcomed fighters in transit to Afghanistan and Kashmir alike.15 Its relationship with the Taliban and Al Qaeda burgeoned in the decade that followed. The mosque’s founder, Muhammad Abdullah Ghazi, met and was professedly inspired by Osama Bin Laden during a trip to Kandahar in 1998 to “pay homage” to the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar. Ghazi was accompanied by his son, Abdul Rashid, who would run the mosque with his elder brother, Abdul Aziz, following their father’s murder barely months later. As journalist Zahid Hussain recounts,

  At the end of the meeting… he picked up bin Laden’s glass of water and drank from it. An amused bin Laden asked him the reason for his action, to which Abdul Rashid replied, “I drank from your glass so that Allah would make me a warrior like you”.16

  Tensions between Lal Masjid and the Pakistani government began after the decision by General Musharraf, Pakistan’s army chief and president, to provide backing to the US invasion of Afghanistan, which the two brothers vocally denounced. In 2004, the delicate relationship between the two sides broke down when Abdul Rashid Ghazi issued a fatwa against the Pakistani army’s operations in Waziristan, the hotbed of militancy in the tribal areas where Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters had fled after the invasion, declaring that “those killed in the battle against Pakistani forces are martyrs”.17 Seventy percent of the students at Lal Masjid and its affiliated seminaries, many of them hardened militants, were from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and North-West Frontier Province, the Pashtun-dominated territory that sits between Islamabad and the tribal regions.18 Ghazi maintained close contact with the leaders of the insurgency. Soon afterwards, he was charged with a plot to blow up the president’s house, the parliament building, and the army headquarters, before being bailed out by the federal minister for religious affairs, Ejaz ul Haq, a patron of the mosque and the son of the former army chief and Pakistani president, General Zia.19 The deal that got Ghazi off the hook, in which he promised not to engage in anti-state activities, didn’t hold for long.20 By 2007, the mosque had become a near-insurrectionary enclave—a heavily armed, pro-Taliban HQ with its own sharia courts and “vice and virtue” groups that attacked music and DVD shops around the capital.21 Yet it was to prove an even greater threat to the authority of the Pakistani state after the convulsive end of the Ghazis’ reign.

  The man on the spot as the kidnapping drama in Islamabad escalated was Luo Zhaohui, a young, self-confident ambassador on the rise, and a rarity in the Chinese foreign ministry both for his South Asia expertise and his towering height. He had taken up the post only recently, alongside his wife Jiang Yili, a fellow diplomat and scholar who had translated Benazir Bhutto’s memoir into Chinese.22 By the cautious standards of Chinese officials, he would play an unusually active role in the events that followed. Instead of leaving the task to the Pakistani government alone, Luo sought to use the influence of leading political figures that he knew had a direct channel to Abdul Rashid Ghazi. After speaking with Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Shaukat Aziz, he met with Maulana Fazlur Rahman, the Opposition Leader, and former Prime Minister Shujaat Hussain, the head of Musharraf ’s PML (Q) party, to seek their support for securing the freedom of the hostages. Rahman had long been the go-to guy for any dealings with this particular fringe of Pakistani political life but it was the PML chief—himself supposedly a user of the “clinic”—who was acting as chief government negotiator with the mosque’s leadership, and fixed up the telephone call between Ghazi and the ambassador from his home.23

  Abdul Rashid Ghazi was seen as a savvy operator, adept in dealing with the media and telling different political audiences what they wanted to hear. His handling of the Chinese was no different. He “assured [Luo] that they would be released soon” and allowed the ambassador to speak to the hostages.24 Despite these promises, there were to be five hours of negotiation with senior police and administration officials, which Musharraf, who was then in Lahore, and Aziz monitored “minute by minute”.25 Deputy Commissioner Chaudhry Muhammad Ali and Senior Superintendent of Police Zafar Iqbal were reported to have “begged” for the release of the hostages, and given assurances about stopping mixed-sex massage parlours in future, before Ghazi finally relented.26 “We released them in view of Pakistan-China friendship” he announced to a crowded press conference. “After receiving a number of complaints regarding ‘sex business’, our students and people of the area took an action that should have been taken by the government”.27 “We greatly respect Pakistan-China friendship but it doesn’t mean that foreign women can come here and indulge in such vulgar activities. Even housewives used to tell us by phone that the centre charges Rs 1,000 for massage while by paying Rs 500, something else was also available”, he said.28 The Chinese women were released in burqas.29

  The “near diplomatic disaster”with China still had further to run.30 The kidnapping took place on the eve of high-level talks in Beijing with the Pakistani interior minister, as part of the preparation for the 2008 Olympics. Those talks would now be a great deal more uncomfortable. After giving his counterpart “an earful” in private,31 Zhou Yongkang,
China’s public security minister, publicly declared on June 27 that “we hope Pakistan will look into the terrorist attacks aiming at Chinese people and organisations as soon as possible and severely punish the criminals”.32 A bracing phone call from Hu Jintao to President Musharraf followed similar lines, and was reinforced by senior PLA officials.33 Word leaked out that in the course of its bilateral talks, China was attributing the instigation of the kidnappings to the influence of militants from China’s Uighur minority at Lal Masjid.34 Islamabad was not just being accused of being negligent in guaranteeing the security of Chinese citizens on Pakistan’s soil but of tolerating terrorist threats to China itself.

  Accounts of the crucial decision-making process in the Pakistani government vary. According to some, it was Chinese pressure itself that ultimately brought the siege about. Others suggest that in the debates over how to respond, China’s concerns were used as a pretext by Musharraf and those around him who had long wanted to move against Lal Masjid anyway but had faced resistance to their previous demands for raids on the mosque.35 Either way, in Musharraf ’s November speech justifying the action, China was at the forefront: “The Chinese, who are such great friends of ours—they took the Chinese hostage and tortured them. Because of this, I was personally embarrassed. I had to go apologize to the Chinese leaders, ‘I am ashamed that you are such great friends and this happened to you’”.36

  On July 3, Pakistani security forces surrounded the Lal Masjid complex and the siege began. Seven days later, following several deadlines, hundreds of surrenders, and Abdul Aziz’s attempt to flee the mosque disguised as a woman, they launched their final, decisive assault. At 4am on July 10, commandos from the Pakistani Army’s Special Services Group stormed the compound. Islamabad shook to the sound of explosions as the battle began, the first time the Pakistani capital had ever experienced fighting on such a scale. The mosque and women’s religious school in the centre of the city was by now a fortified enclave, protected by heavily-armed militants, and it took over twenty hours for the Pakistani forces to battle their way through the basements, bunkers and tunnels.37 By the time the commando raid, Operation Silence, was over at least 103 people were dead. Some accounts place the numbers closer to several hundred.38 Among the dead were many of the baton-wielding, burqa-clad female shock troops who had been dispensing vigilante justice around Islamabad. Of the 15 non-Afghan foreigners killed, 12 were Uighurs.39 And among the Pakistanis was Abdul Rashid Ghazi himself, who died during the crossfire in the last standoff in the Jamia Hafsa madrassa’s basement, shortly after giving his last telephone interview to Pakistan’s Geo TV.