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

  China did not have to wait long for the repercussions. Even as the siege was underway, an act of apparent retaliation saw three Chinese engineers at an auto-rickshaw factory in Peshawar murdered by gunmen shouting religious slogans.40 Beijing was just getting used to being targeted by Baloch militants for its involvement in the Gwadar port development, but this was something altogether new. Belatedly, they moved to issue a public denial of any involvement, stating that “China did not push Pakistan for operations against the Red Mosque… It is the consistent policy of China not to meddle in the domestic affairs of other countries”.41 Few were convinced. More than a year later, following another kidnapping of Chinese workers, a Taliban spokesman was still citing “Chinese pressure to launch Operation Silence” at Lal Masjid as part of the rationale for seizing the engineers.42 Luo Zhaohui himself would end up on a Taliban hit list. “The militants were offended”, said one senior Peshawari journalist, “the feeling among them was that it would not have happened if the Chinese had not demanded action”.43 Pakistan was on its way to becoming the single most dangerous overseas location for Chinese workers.

  Yet it was the consequences for Pakistan itself that were even more troubling for Beijing. The siege was a watershed moment for the country, the point after which the Pakistani government’s delicate dance with the new wave of militants turned into open warfare. The assault on the mosque was used as a rallying cry by extremists, proof that the Pakistani military had betrayed them. A wave of violence and bombings convulsed Pakistan’s major cities. Before July 2007 there had been only 42 suicide attacks in Pakistan. There were more than 47 in the remaining months of 2007 alone,44 and in the year after the siege, 1,188 people were killed and 3,209 wounded.45 Osama Bin Laden issued his first statement urging attacks on the Pakistani government.46 Insurgents that had been reluctant to turn their focus away from Afghanistan were now snapping away at the hand that once fed them. The array of militant groups in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) annulled their peace agreement with the Pakistani government and consolidated themselves into a new organisation—the Tehrik-i-Taliban-Pakistan. In less than two years, they would control territory within 60 miles of Islamabad.47 One of the Pakistani army’s crack corps had to be deployed to protect the Karakoram Highway, the principal land artery between China and Pakistan, which was believed to be under threat.48 The economy, the stock exchange, and inward investment all plummeted and have never fully recovered. Neither did Musharraf. Within months, he would be swept away to be replaced by a new government led by Benazir Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, a man Beijing found far less congenial to deal with. China’s relationship with Pakistan has never been quite the same again.

  INTRODUCTION

  “Pakistan is China’s Israel.”

  General Xiong Guangkai1

  For decades, Beijing’s secretive ties with Islamabad have run closer than most formal alliances. Founded on a shared enmity with India, China’s backing to Pakistan has gone so deep that it was willing to offer the ultimate gift from one state to another: the materials that Pakistan’s nuclear scientists needed to build the bomb. Pakistan acted as China’s backdoor during its years of diplomatic isolation, the bridge between Nixon and Mao, and the front-line in Beijing’s struggles with the Soviet Union during the late stages of the Cold War. Now, Pakistan is a central part of China’s transition from a regional power to a global one. The country lies at the heart of Beijing’s plans for a network of ports, pipelines, roads and railways connecting the oil and gas fields of the Middle East to the mega-cities of East Asia. Its coastline is becoming a crucial staging post for China’s take-off as a naval power, extending its reach from the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea. Penetration by Pakistan’s intelligence services into the darkest corners of global jihadi networks are a vital asset to China as it navigates its growing interests in the Islamic world, and seeks to choke off support for the militant activities that pose one of the gravest threats to China’s internal stability.

  For Pakistan, China is the best potential ticket out of instability and economic weakness, the greatest hope that a region contemplating a security vacuum after the West’s withdrawal from Afghanistan can instead become an integral part of a new Silk Road. China has been Pakistan’s diplomatic protector, its chief arms supplier, and its call of last resort when every other supposed friend has left it in the lurch. Virtually every important moment in Pakistan’s recent history has been punctuated with visits by its presidents, prime ministers and army chiefs to Beijing, where the deals and deliberations have so often proved to have a decisive impact on the country’s fate. Yet all of this now hangs in the balance. Pakistan is becoming the battleground for China’s encounters with Islamic militancy, the country more than any other where China’s rise has turned it into a target. As extremists at war with the Pakistani government train their sights on its increasingly powerful sponsor, this is the place where so many of Beijing’s plans for the wider region, for its relationship with the Islamic world, for its counter-terrorism strategy, and for the stability of its western periphery could completely unravel.

  Sino-Pakistani ties have proved remarkably resilient since their early, tentative days. Across the last few decades they have survived China’s transition from Maoism to market economy, the rise of Islamic militancy in the region, and the shifting cross-currents of the two countries’ relationships with India and the United States. Even developments that might have pulled the two sides apart have often ended up forcing them closer together. India’s economic resurgence and the warming of New Delhi’s ties with Washington could have tempted Beijing to contemplate a policy of equidistance in South Asia. Instead China has moved to bolster Pakistan further against the rise of a more potent rival. Concerns over growing unrest in the Muslim-majority province of Xinjiang, in China’s far west, might have resulted in deepening tensions over Islamabad’s dealings with extremist groups. It has instead led China to depend all the more heavily on Pakistani security forces. And while Chinese concerns about Pakistan’s stability have undoubtedly stalled some commercial ventures, they have ultimately resulted in China doubling down on its economic support in order to help keep Pakistan’s head above water.

  At times, the continued vitality of a relationship that could have ended up as a quaint legacy of the 1960s is a puzzle to outside observers. It can seem thin, lacking the sense of cultural affinity or common values that so often help to underpin friendships and alliances. Pakistan looks to the West and to the Islamic world as its reference points, not to the Middle Kingdom. Even the language—“all-weather friends”, “deeper than the deepest ocean”, “sweeter than honey”—can sound like protesting too much. And when the question posed is “What does Pakistan actually do for China?” the answers that come back are often a little lacklustre. Yet traditionally, the strength of the relationship has hinged on the fact that Beijing has rarely needed Pakistan to do anything vastly different from what it intends to do anyway. Just as advocates of deeper ties between Washington and New Delhi have argued that “American strategic generosity towards India [is] an investment in its own geopolitical well being,”2 to be pursued regardless of any Indian quid-pro-quo, China’s policy sees a strong, capable Pakistan as an asset to China in its own right. Of course China would like to see Islamabad exercising greater caution and predictability in its dealings with India. It wants Pakistan to do a more convincing job of combating Uighur militancy. It would prefer Pakistan to run a better-functioning economy. But none of these concerns obviate the essential fact that an India that is forced to look nervously over its shoulder at its western neighbour is easier for Beijing to manage.

  The early chapters of this book look at these India-centric foundations for the China-Pakistan relationship. The first chapter deals with three crucial wars. The Sino-Indian war of 1962 made the value of strategic cooperation fully apparent to the Chinese and the Pakistanis and brought a rapid resolution to their own outstanding border disp
ute.The Indo-Pakistani war of 1965, in which there was a real prospect of Chinese intervention on Pakistan’s behalf, formed the basis of China’s status as the “all-weather friend” in the Pakistani public imagination. The 1971 Indo-Pakistani war—in which Beijing failed to come to Islamabad’s aid—ostensibly showed the limits of the relationship. Yet in many ways it set in motion security cooperation of an even more significant nature. China and Pakistan have never been treaty allies and their armies come from such radically different traditions that the two sides have often talked past each other on matters of strategy. But after Pakistan’s devastating defeat, China helped the country to develop a set of military capabilities to ensure that it would never face the same fate again. Central to this was China’s backing for Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions, the subject of the book’s second chapter. Close collaboration on an area of such high sensitivity has built a level of trust between the two militaries that a more conventional security partnership might never have delivered. And although it ensured, as the third chapter shows, that during subsequent crises on the subcontinent China was far more likely to try to defuse the risk of war than to swing in behind the Pakistanis in a confrontation with New Delhi, the fundamental nature of China’s support has been unwavering. Even as the Sino-Indian relationship has improved, India’s rise as a potential competitor to Beijing has further reinforced the original rationale for its partnership with Pakistan.

  While the relationship between China and Pakistan could once be seen almost exclusively through a South Asian security framework—as a subset of the China-India and India-Pakistan rivalries—there are now a host of factors that transcend it. India still provides the strategic glue that binds the two sides together, but the dilemmas Beijing is wrestling with in Pakistan and Afghanistan are at the crux of a far larger set of issues.

  The fourth chapter looks at Xinjiang—the restive, Muslim-majority region in China’s north-west—and the role that China’s struggles with terrorism have played in the Sino-Pakistani relationship. While Pakistan was once the main religious and economic outlet for the Uighurs, Xinjiang’s indigenous Muslim inhabitants, it has now become their principal connection to the world of extremism. The linkages between security threats in China and the rise of extremist forces in south-west and central Asia have become the greatest sore point in Sino-Pakistani ties, and even raised anxieties in Beijing about whether Pakistan’s “Islamization” puts the underlying basis of the relationship in doubt. Militancy in Pakistan has also threatened to derail the two sides’ plans to add a serious economic dimension to a partnership that has been almost entirely about security. Chinese investments and Chinese workers in Pakistan have become targets for militants trying to stoke tension between Islamabad and Beijing, turning the country into the most dangerous place to be an overseas Chinese worker. Yet as the fifth chapter argues, when there has been a serious enough strategic imperative for China, the two sides’ grand economic projects have been able to overcome seemingly insuperable obstacles. From the Karakoram Highway to Gwadar port, political and military factors have continued to provide momentum even when the commercial rationale is absent.

  The sixth chapter focuses on Afghanistan, where China has struggled to decide whether militancy or the presence of a geostrategic rival poses the greater threat. The period since 9/11 has seen China sit on the sidelines of a war that it wanted neither the Taliban nor the United States to win. Yet as the US withdrawal has loomed ever closer and the terrorist threat from Xinjiang has grown, the balance in the Chinese debate has tipped in favor of the view that stabilizing China’s western periphery is the more pressing task—even if it involves cooperating with Washington. Pakistan is the country where China’s concerns about the spillover of instability in Afghanistan are greatest, and it is to Pakistan that China looks for a long-term political solution there. The final chapter traces China’s evolution from free-rider to potential regional stabilizer, and the Obama’s administration’s often-frustrating efforts to find common cause with Beijing. Where China’s assertiveness in East Asia has resulted in intensifying strategic rivalry with the United States and the discomfort of its neighbours, this is a region where Chinese assertiveness—including leaning on its Pakistani friends—is exactly what Washington has been seeking.

  For Xi Jinping’s new government in Beijing, sitting on the sidelines no longer looks like the most prudent approach. As the epilogue sets out, China hopes to use its financial and economic weight to change the balance of incentives in its western neighbourhood, launching a set of vastly ambitious trade and infrastructure initiatives that could be transformative in their impact. Pakistan is set to be the greatest beneficiary. With the West’s strategic footprint diminishing as the war in Afghanistan winds down, China is stepping in with tens of billions of dollars of investments in projects that were once thought to be little more than pipe-dreams. While this is partly driven by a sense of strategic and economic opportunity on Beijing’s part, it is also motivated by fear. Pakistan’s troubles, and the threat of looming chaos in the region, have reinforced to China how much its interests will be harmed if its only reliable friend is left fragile and faltering.

  In-depth studies on the China-Pakistan relationship are few and far between, with virtually no full-length treatments appearing since the early 1970s. This is partly because the subject is something of an intellectual orphan, falling between a variety of regions and disciplines, and partly because the obstacles facing analysts in their efforts to find reliable sources and establish basic facts make it that much more tempting to neglect. The Sino-Pakistani relationship encompasses some of the most sensitive areas of the two sides’ national security policies. Officials in China and Pakistan are naturally circumspect when discussing it. And this is not just true for foreign researchers—even the limited number of Chinese and Pakistani analysts who study the relationship are liable to run into roadblocks. One Chinese academic complained that virtually every time he requested a declassified document from the foreign ministry archives they treated his interest as reason enough to classify it again.

  As a result, much of the contemporary analysis of the China-Pakistan relationship is mediated through a series of distorting prisms. In India, the circulation of leaks and rumours about nefarious Sino-Pakistani activities is virtually a cottage industry. In Pakistan, political leaders have often been eager to dress up tentative plans between the two sides as firm agreements, and to portray Chinese backing for their position as far stronger than exists in reality. In China, articles on topics such as the nuclear relationship are designed to mislead, not to enlighten. At times it seems that almost any questionable claim can quickly gain traction, be recycled, and take on the status of accepted truth. China’s supposed plans for military bases in FATA,3 Pakistan’s supposed intentions to lease China a tenth of its territory,4 and the purported presence of 11,000 Chinese troops in Pakistan’s north5 are only a few of the most recent on a long list.

  The mysteries and distorted claims about Sino-Pakistani ties have sometimes made it difficult for outside observers to reach accurate assessments. It would be one thing if every wild story turned out to be a myth, but some of the most outlandish-seeming claims have proved to be entirely accurate. As one nuclear expert writes: “China’s deal with Pakistan was so dramatic that there was little consensus among U.S. government officials over what ultimate agenda it served”.6 Anyone tempted to downplay all the rumours that emanate from this unusual relationship risks missing developments of transformative importance.

  This book is the culmination of six years of traveling between the different countries that are its main focus—China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and the United States—confirming and disconfirming claims, testing out hypotheses, and assessing the reliability of various sources against real-world events. While it doesn’t seek to provide a comprehensive history or anatomy of the relationship, I hope it will help to provide a starting point for thinking through the most important issues at stake. Over the perio
d of research, the relationship has also started to open up. The reflexive protectiveness that had long characterised discussion of the subject, particularly in China, is beginning to ease. A few years back, many of the officials I met with were suspicious of why a foreigner was so interested in talking to them about the relationship. By the time I was finishing my research, almost everything was on the table, from debates in Beijing about whether to launch nuclear strikes on India if Islamabad came under threat, to China’s complaints about the Pakistani intelligence services’ ties with Uighur militants. Yet in the study of both Chinese and Pakistani foreign policy, it remains an unusual case. The pathologies of China and Pakistan’s most difficult relationships have been exhaustively explored, and do much to shape our understanding of the two countries—but a very different perspective is opened up when we look at how they deal with their friends.

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  A FRIENDSHIP FORGED BY WAR

  “We have been let down by the Americans” Ayub said, “but they are frightened of Chinese involvement”. “And that, Mr President, is now the only card in your hands”, said the Information Secretary. Ayub sat up and, putting the book down on the table, said: “Then let us use that card”.