The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics

by Andrew Small

  The agreement had been negotiated on the Pakistani side by Bhutto’s predecessor as Foreign Minister, Manzur Qadir, under the close supervision of Ayub Khan, but it was Bhutto who arrived in Beijing in March 1963 to sign the agreement with his Chinese counterpart, Chen Yi, and win much of the acclaim.109 The settlement announced was on terms clearly favourable to Pakistan. China would transfer 1,942 square kilometres that it controlled to Pakistan.110 Although its nominal concessions were substantial, Pakistan transferred none of the territory under its control, and the final demarcation—which included six of seven contested passes—accorded closely with the line of actual control that it advocated. Pakistan was not the only beneficiary of Chinese efforts at the time—Afghanistan also saw a relatively generous agreement put in motion that same year—but the China-Pakistan accord was of genuine strategic importance.111 It infuriated India, which still claimed much of the territory in question, several thousand square kilometres of which had now been assigned to China. Notionally it was still a provisional agreement that could be reopened in the event of a broader set of talks on Kashmir. In reality, it would entrench Chinese and Pakistani control over northern Kashmir, providing the basis for a mammoth set of infrastructure projects between the two sides which continue to this day.

  The three wars that frame this chapter were the last ones in which Galbraith’s “nightmare” of an attack on India from two fronts was realistically contemplated. The nuclearization of the subcontinent fundamentally changed China’s handling of subsequent Indo-Pakistani confrontations, and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s successors were to receive an even cooler reception when they flew to Beijing during periods of conflict to solicit Chinese support. China’s leaders no longer counselled their Pakistani counterparts to prepare to wage guerrilla warfare from the hills. Instead, after 1971 the most serious military cooperation took place away from the spotlight of war. In reality, China’s greatest contribution to Pakistan’s security has never really been the prospect of an intervention on its behalf. Beijing gave Pakistan something far more important than that: the ultimate means of self-defence.

  2

  NUCLEAR FUSION

  [China does] not advocate nuclear proliferation at all, but we even more strongly oppose nuclear monopolies.

  Deng Xiaoping, 19751

  As long as they need the bomb, they will lick your balls. As soon as you have delivered the bomb, they will kick your balls.

  Li Jue, China’s nuclear weapons chief, speaking to Abdul Qadeer Khan, head of Pakistan’s nuclear enrichment programme, about the Pakistani army2

  Non-existent is the issue of China’s nuclear and missile proliferation to Pakistan.

  Zhou Gang, Chinese ambassador to India3

  In January 2004, a strange handover ceremony took place in Tripoli. In a meeting room at Libya’s National Board for Scientific Research, the country’s nuclear chief, Matuq Mohammed Matuq, presented two white plastic bags to Donald Mahley and David Landsman, the American and British heads of the disarmament effort in Libya. Emblazoned on the bags in red letters was the name of an Islamabad tailor, Good Looks Fabrics and Tailors. The contents were so sensitive that most of the senior members of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) did not even have the security clearance to look at them. The task of examining the documents was left to Jacques Baute, a French IAEA official, who confirmed their veracity and sent them on a plane straight to Washington, where they were taken from Dulles Airport by armed couriers to a high security vault at the Department of Energy. One of the bags contained drawings and blueprints. The other contained detailed technical instructions. Between them, they provided step-by-step instructions for assembling a nuclear bomb.4

  It was not hard to work out where they had originated. While the primary text was in English, a number of the papers were in Chinese. There was also a collection of handwritten notes based on a set of lectures given by Chinese weapons experts in the early 1980s, whose names, and the dates the seminars spanned, were included in the documents.5 The design in the documents was for a Chinese nuclear warhead, 453kg in mass, and less than a metre in diameter.6 It was notably similar to a weapon known to have been tested by China in the 1960s, the CHIC-4. While too large for Libyan Scud missiles, it could have been easily airdropped or fitted on a more sophisticated system, such as the North Korean Nodong missile or Iran’s Shahab-3 missile.7 In principle, the simple device could also have been used by terrorist groups: one nuclear expert noted that “you could drive it away in a pickup truck”.8 The documents were missing a few of the crucial designs required for implosion, but all in all there was about 95 per cent of the information needed to make a bomb9—crude by the standards of modern weapons but smaller and more sophisticated than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.10

  The deal that Colonel Gaddafi cut with the United States and the United Kingdom—the dismantling of Libya’s Weapons of Mass Destruction programme in return for its emergence from pariah status—was the beginning of the end for the A.Q. Khan proliferation network.11 A.Q. Khan’s nuclear black-marketeering had played a crucial role in bringing the bomb to Pakistan before those same nuclear secrets were sold to an assortment of rogue states. After years of denying US intelligence reports that had become increasingly incontrovertible, the haul of material in Libya finally forced the Pakistani government to act against the man who was then still a national hero, known as the “father” of the nuclear programme that had enabled Pakistan to go toe-to-toe with India.12 The haul even included centrifuge components that were still in their “Khan Research Lab” cargo boxes.13 Within days of the handover, Abdul Qadeer Khan was removed from his official position by Pakistan’s National Command Authority, which controls the country’s nuclear programme, and placed under house arrest. In the aftermath, the story of his theft of centrifuge designs from URENCO, the European nuclear power consortium, and the eager customers from Tehran to Pyongyang has been widely retold.14 Over two decades, A.Q. Khan and his associates had proliferated nuclear technology, material and designs in a black market that spanned four continents. But the documents, and A.Q. Khan’s subsequent efforts to clear his name, also cast fresh light on the murky question of Beijing’s involvement in the Pakistani nuclear weapons programme, a vital precursor for his proliferation activities. While the basic facts of the two sides’ collaboration have been clear to Western intelligence agencies for a long time, some of the important details were elusive—and remain so. “The specific nature of its nuclear agreements with China” is, notes one Pakistani nuclear expert, “one of the most closely guarded secrets in Pakistan”.15

  If the military relationship lies at the heart of China-Pakistan ties, nuclear weapons lie at the heart of the military relationship. Economic relations between the two sides have traditionally been weak, a problem to fix rather than a source of strength. Cultural ties have always been thin. Beyond the subcontinent, Pakistan looks to the West or to the Islamic world for intellectual and cultural influence, never to the Middle Kingdom. The underpinning of the relationship is widely understood to be a common strategic concern—about India—and the military ties that stem from it. Yet there are enduring questions about what this actually amounts to.

  China has never committed soldiers on Pakistan’s behalf, even when the country was being dismembered in 1971. It has been an essential military equipment supplier, all the more so given its willingness to prop up crucial parts of Pakistan’s military-industrial infrastructure and to keep the tanks, guns and ammunition flowing when virtually all other options were cut off. This is not to be underrated. As one expert on the Pakistani army put it: “The prevailing view in the armed services appears to be that there is only one country that can be trusted to maintain military supplies irrespective of Pakistan’s internal developments.”16 But the high-end American kit—the F-16s, the Harpoon anti-ship missiles, the P-3 Orion anti-submarine aircraft—has always been more prized by Pakistan’s armed forces, and doubts about the quality of Chinese equipment persist to this
day.17 A shared strategic opponent has not entailed that China and Pakistan are joined up in their views on tactics, calculations of acceptable risk, or the legitimacy and advisability of specific military actions. And although the relationship is at times referred to as an “alliance”, it is no such thing. There have been no defence treaties, security guarantees, or serious preparations for joint military responses to different contingencies.18 When Bhutto, in 1974, suggested to Zhou Enlai that the two sides enter a defence pact, “the Chinese premier politely declined the suggestion”.19 It has stayed that way ever since. A treaty signed in 2005 gives some legal justification for one side to come to the other’s aid but no obligation.20 For a long time even the military cultures of the two countries seemed incompatible. Anecdotes from the visit of a Pakistani military delegation to Beijing in 1966, as they attempt to replace the equipment that had been lost in the 1965 war, are illustrative:

  When our officers met their Chinese counterparts, who wore neither smart uniforms nor any badges of rank, they found this somewhat disconcerting and confusing. In fact, a Pakistani General at the time of the Delegation’s departure asked one of the very modest-looking individuals, who was dressed in unpressed trousers and jacket, to fetch his suitcase. The man actually moved to comply. I was horrified and stopped him, and apologized for my countryman’s blunder—he was a Lieutenant General in the People’s Liberation Army and a veteran of the Long March.21

  Zhou Enlai, after enquiring why the Pakistanis only required fourteen days of ammunition from China—“How can a war be fought in that short time?”22—went on to probe the generals:

  “I would be interested to know if you have prepared the people of Pakistan to operate in the rear of the enemy…I am talking about a People’s Militia being based in every village and town. Since Pakistan lacks an industrial base to replenish supplies, this kind of defence is obviously well-suited to its needs.”

  There was a stunned silence among the Generals. The concept of putting arms into the hands of the common man was totally alien to them; in fact, it was deemed a threat to law and order in Pakistan. The notion of a prolonged conflict involving the citizenry of Pakistan was not part of the defence strategy planned by these professional soldiers…When the generals met at my home for dinner that night they appeared to be upset, and one of them said: ‘War is a serious business and should be left to the professionals. Imagine a People’s Militia!…What does Zhou Enlai know about soldiering and military affairs anyway?’… I reminded him that Zhou Enlai had fought in more battles than one could count. For several years he was a Divisional Commander and then Chief of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army.23

  A Pakistani military elite that emerged through Sandhurst and the British imperial army, and a Chinese leadership that had come to power through the Long March, guerrilla warfare, and Leninist re-education campaigns in Yan’an, hardly seemed destined to be “all-weather friends”. Yet in parallel to these talks about small arms, an act of procurement on a far more spectacular scale was already being contemplated, which was worth the risk of foregoing any number of American jet fighters. The area where the value of the Sino-Pakistani military relationship has been greatest has been the one about which they can say the least.

  Before Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was hanged in 1979, he wrote a last testament by hand in his prison cell. While much of the document focused on responding to the charges levelled against him by General Zia, who had seized power from Bhutto in a coup two years earlier, there were also a couple of references that would initially be mysterious to the text’s readers:

  In the light of recent developments which have taken place, my single most important achievement, which I believe will dominate the portrait of my public life, is an agreement which I arrived at after an assiduous and tenacious endeavour spanning over eleven years of negotiations. In the present context, the agreement of mine, concluded in June 1976, will perhaps be my greatest achievement and contribution to the survival of our people and our nation.24

  They were not mysterious for long. It was already clear by the early 1980s that this achievement was securing Chinese support for the development of a Pakistani bomb. The final, decisive meeting is immortalized in a photograph that shows Bhutto and a frail Mao Zedong shaking hands, the last shot taken of a meeting between Mao and any foreign leader.25 Then terminally ill, he would die a few months later, but the agreement stuck. Discussions between the two sides had been underway since that defining year. “1965 was critical for us,” recalled Aga Shahi, one of the architects of the policy, in a later interview. “We made a pact with Beijing that ushered in decades of assistance we could not have got elsewhere.”26 Pakistan’s decision to move ahead with a nuclear programme in the first place was itself closely intertwined with the decision to throw its chips in with China. The “pro-bomb camp”, led by Bhutto and others in the foreign ministry, and the “anti-bomb camp”, led by Finance Minister Muhammad Shoaib and a number of close economic advisers to Ayub Khan, were also at odds over the development of relations with Beijing.27 The latter group wanted to tread cautiously, minimizing the risks to the US-Pakistan relationship and Pakistan’s standing in the international community. The former believed that the US-Pakistan alliance was doomed to disappoint, and with the Non-Proliferation Treaty and other restrictions on nuclear trade in the offing, the window of opportunity to compete with India was closing. Bhutto’s famous pronouncement in 1965, that “If … India builds the atom bomb…. Pakistan will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own”, would hence bind Pakistan’s fate up with the strategic calculations of its eastern neighbour for decades to come.28 The final impetus for the deal, though, was provided by India’s nuclear test in 1974. “Smiling Buddha”, as the first detonation of an Indian bomb was codenamed, threatened to tip the South Asian military balance decisively in favour of New Delhi, and bracket India with nuclear-armed China instead. But as in so many other areas, Chinese assistance to Pakistan helped to ensure that India would instead be re-hyphenated with its other neighbour. During the Pakistani foreign minister’s visit to Beijing after the nuclear test, China gave its consent to help Pakistan develop a “nuclear blast” capacity.29

  Reinforcing Pakistan’s balancing role was not the only motivation for Beijing: at least in theory, nuclear cooperation was a two-way street. Not so long before, China too had been stuck on the outside of the nuclear club. The threat of US atomic weapons being used on the Chinese mainland loomed large during the Korean War and the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1955, prompting Beijing’s decision to acquire nuclear capabilities of its own.30 Yet crucial Soviet assistance to China’s strategic weapons programme had been abruptly curtailed as ideological tensions between Mao and Khrushchev grew. At one point, China’s bomb designers made daily trips to Beijing railway station in the hope of picking up a Soviet prototype that was promised but never arrived.31 Moscow also reneged on its agreement to provide the uranium hexaflouride (UF6)—the gaseous uranium compound required for enrichment—that China needed for its first bomb. UF6 became the “weakest link in the chain”32 of China’s nuclear industrial production. A few final clues for implosion were gleaned from the reassembled scraps of some shredded documents the Soviet weapons specialists left behind in China before their abrupt departure.33 After that the Chinese scientists were on their own.

  Within a few years China would become the fifth country in the world to test a nuclear bomb, and Beijing moved quickly to acquire all the accoutrements of a strategic weapons programme. However, the sudden cut-off of scientific cooperation with the Soviet Union, and the absence of contact with the Western nuclear powers, left the Chinese scientists well aware that their nuclear programme was still lagging far behind those of the countries against which they had established it to defend themselves.34 Weaknesses in their uranium enrichment capacities would be one of the main drivers for China’s decision to join the IAEA in 1984, which promised access to superior enrichment technology.35 Vulnerabilitie
s in the Chinese weapons programme would also provide part of the impetus for agreeing to intelligence and military cooperation with the United States in 1979.36 Beijing even asked Iran to pass on copies of its nuclear contracts with the West, in the hope that they might furnish some clues. But Pakistan promised something different—full spectrum collaboration: “One critical factor the two nations had in common was denial of certain Western technologies. Thus, their relationship was mutually beneficial—every piece of technology Pakistan managed to acquire would be available to the Chinese for reverse engineering.”37

  In September 1976, A.Q. Khan joined the Pakistani delegation at Mao’s funeral, where he and his colleagues met three leading Chinese nuclear officials, Li Jue, Liu Wei and Jiang Shengjie. Jiang Shengjie was the nuclear fuel bureau chief, and one of China’s top nuclear scientists.38 Liu Wei managed the development of China’s nuclear plants and had been in charge of the “Bureau of Architectural Technology”, one of the two organs that originally launched China’s nuclear weapons programme, overseeing the experimental nuclear reactor and cyclotron supplied by the Soviets. The most senior figure was Li Jue, who was in charge of research and development for China’s nuclear weapons programme. He had run the Ninth Bureau—the “most secret organisation in the entire nuclear program”—during the critical phase of its development, overseeing uranium enrichment, nuclear testing, and the weapons research facility, China’s own Los Alamos.39

  This was one of A.Q. Khan’s first overseas trips as a representative of the Pakistani government. He had only made his permanent return to Pakistan at the end of the previous year, bringing with him the designs for virtually every centrifuge he could lay his hands on at URENCO’s facilities in the Netherlands. By July he had established his own research laboratory reporting directly to the Pakistani prime minister, and by September he had settled on the Punjabi town of Kahuta, about 20 miles south-east of Islamabad, as the location for his secret plant.40 While Pakistan’s needs were certainly on the table in the meetings, so too were China’s. He briefed them on how European-designed centrifuges could help China’s enrichment programme. “Chinese experts started coming regularly to learn the whole technology” from Pakistan, A.Q. Khan states in his account.41 Pakistani experts were sent to Hanzhong, near the ancient Chinese capital of Xian, where they helped “put up a centrifuge plant”. “We sent 135 C-130 plane loads of machines, inverters, valves, flow meters, pressure gauges,” he wrote. “Our teams stayed there for weeks to help and their teams stayed here for weeks at a time.”42 But what Pakistan got in return was far greater.