The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics

by Andrew Small

  The first major clandestine opposition group had pan-Turkic and Marxist affiliations, rather than Islamic ones. Formed in 1967, the Eastern Turkistan People’s Revolutionary Party was composed of young Uighurs and former officials from the short-lived East Turkistan republic. It was backed by the KGB, which provided weapons, funds and radio transmitters,43 and advocated an “independent, secular, and communist East Turkistan oriented towards the Soviet Union”.44 The main instigator of insurrectionary activities through the late 1960s and the 1970s, deemed at one point to be the most serious “counter-revolutionary separatist conspiracy”45 since the founding of the PRC, it would eventually fade from the scene following the arrests of its leaders and the withdrawal of Soviet support.46

  Taking over its mantle was the forerunner of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement: the East Turkistan Islamic Party (ETIP). Like its Marxist predecessor, ETIP also tapped into pan-Turkic currents and sought an independent homeland, but it was closely associated with the Islamist revival in Xinjiang. It first came to prominence during an uprising at Baren, near Kashgar, in April 1990. Like many of the descriptions of militant activity in Xinjiang throughout the decade, accounts of the Baren incident are contradictory, and seem to reflect competing political objectives over how the scale of the violence, the motives behind it, and the response from the Chinese government should be seen.47 The local ETIP leader was a man named Zäydin Yusuf, who had recruited members of the party at mosques in Southern Xinjiang,48 which were used to “disseminate a call to arms”.49 Hundreds of men marched on government offices in Baren, protesting against everything from the Chinese government’s policies of forced abortions for Uighur women to the exploitation of Xinjiang’s resources, chanting the shahada and in some instances jihadi slogans.50 The Chinese government sent in troops but in the resulting riots the Uighur fighters captured rifles and ammunition. In the end, large-scale military deployments and even the PLA Air Force were required to crush the mini-insurrection.51 ETIP appear to have suffered from the subsequent clampdown, with many of its activists arrested or killed.52

  The Chinese government held other Islamist groups responsible for the attacks that plagued Xinjiang in the intervening years. A bus attack at Chinese New Year in 1992, for instance, was attributed to the “Shock Brigade of the Islamic Reformist Party”.53 The “East Turkistan Democratic Islamic Party” was credited with bomb attacks that killed four victims in 1993.54 A series of bus bombings in Urumqi on the day of Deng Xiaoping’s funeral in February 1997—the last major attack in Xinjiang for a decade—was pinned on the “East Turkistan National Unity Alliance”.55 But it was ETIP that was the reference point for future generations of militants, who would hark back to Zäydin Yusuf and the Baren rebellion in their propaganda videos. When the organization was reconstituted, it was in a new base: Afghanistan.

  Uighurs had been involved in the mujahideen’s campaign in Afghanistan in the 1980s but only in small numbers, and not in separate fighting units. One visitor to the training camps they attended in Khost and Paktia described them as “lost in the huge crowd of foreign militants. They didn’t have a very visible presence.”56 It did nonetheless mean that a cadre of Uighurs were radicalized and integrated into a network of relationships with other militants. These relationships would prove useful for ETIP’s new leader, Hasan Mahsum, who is believed to have taken over the leadership of the party in 1997. Mahsum was born in Shule County, in the far west of Xinjiang, and studied at an Islamic school established by one of ETIP’s founders.57 He was imprisoned for several months as a result of his role in the Baren uprising, and following a subsequent arrest in October 1993 on terrorism charges, he was sentenced to three years of re-education through labour.58 After another arrest during the first Strike Hard campaign in 1996, he finally left Xinjiang. His travels took him to Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, where he sought funding and support from sympathizers for the ETIP’s activities, without a great deal of success.59 Taliban-led Afghanistan proved more fertile territory. The Taliban granted Mahsum an Afghan passport60 and allowed him to set up training camps, as well as running the operations of the group out of Kabul, which in 1998 became the headquarters of the group now known as the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM).61 China claims that ETIM sent “scores of terrorists” into China, establishing bases in Xinjiang and setting up training stations and workshops to produce weapons, ammunition and explosives.62 The group’s capacity to operate effectively in Xinjiang remains a point of debate, but the scale of its Afghan base was in less doubt: ETIM itself claims to have trained its members in camps in Khost, Bagram, Herat, and Kabul.63

  It was not only ETIM activities in Afghanistan that were a problem for China. It was also the Central Asian militants who worked with them, whose backing would later prove essential to the group’s survival. The most important of these was the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). The organization was founded by Tohir Yuldashev, an Islamic leader from the Ferghana Valley, and Juma Namangani, a former Soviet paratrooper who had fought as a conscript in Afghanistan in the Soviet forces.64 The two men were initially based in Uzbekistan, but they spent much of the 1990s operating from outside the country. Namangani, who ran the IMU’s military operations, was heavily engaged in the civil war in Tajikistan, where he led a group that included Chechens, Arabs, Afghans, Tajiks—and Uighurs—in opposition to the Dushanbe government.65 Yuldashev spent the same period in Peshawar, where he built relations with the Iranian, Pakistani, Saudi, Turkish and Russian intelligence agencies, transnational terrorist groups, and Pakistani militants and financiers, including the JUI.66 Yuldashev and Namangani formally established the IMU in 1998, and moved their operational base to Afghanistan. They continued to launch forays into Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan from bases in the north of the country, as well as fighting on the Taliban’s behalf.67 From China’s perspective, however, the greatest problem they posed was their capacity to provide a network and support base for an array of other Central Asian militants. The IMU would ultimately become ETIM’s hosts, first in Afghanistan and later in Pakistan, where the two groups ended up becoming virtually intertwined.68

  China’s response to the Uighur militants’ growing connections to extremists across the region was to internationalize its Strike Hard campaign. Governments in Central Asia were pressed by Beijing to clamp down on the “three evils”: terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism.69 The founding in 1996 of the Shanghai Five, which later evolved into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, was in large part a product of Beijing’s concerns about Uighur militants and their Central Asian backers.70 For much of the 1990s, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan—the original members, with Russia and China—were the principal focus, and China provided aid and military support to facilitate their efforts.71 In the late 1990s, as ETIM established its base in Afghanistan, China’s campaign stepped up in south-west Asia too. The task in Afghanistan and Pakistan, however, was a more complex one for the Chinese than that of bolstering the tough, secular-minded Central Asian states in their crackdowns on religious militants (and other opponents that were tarred with the same brush). For Pakistan, these militants were a vital asset of its intelligence services, and in Afghanistan, they comprised its government.

  China has been intimately involved in Pakistan’s history of using irregular forces as an instrument of its military strategy. For all the early disagreements between Zhou Enlai and Ayub Khan about the utility of guerrilla warfare, it proved to be one of the two sides’ closest areas of tactical cooperation. In the early 1960s, the Pakistani army launched a series of studies of the concept of low intensity conflict.72 While Mao and Zhou had urged Pakistan to do so in the context of a defensive strategy in a war with India, the Pakistanis’ greatest interest in Maoist military doctrine was from the offensive side: a people’s war in Kashmir. Pakistan had already used non-state actors in Kashmir—largely Pashtun tribal militias—in the first Indo-Pakistani war in 1947, but the 1965 and 1971 wars involved more systematic a
ttempts to put the approach into practice.73 In 1965, companies of irregulars were infiltrated across the Line of Control in the (mistaken) belief that local forces would rise up in support.74 And in 1971, irregular forces were raised in East Pakistan, some of which were believed to be responsible for among the war’s worst atrocities.75

  China and Pakistan even collaborated directly. For much of the 1960s and 1970s, Beijing armed and trained insurgencies in India’s northeast, such as those among the Nagas and the Mizo.76 The Manipuri rebels, who received training in Tibet, named their militia force the “People’s Liberation Army” in tribute to their instructors.77 China even dallied with the idea of aiding the Naxalites, India’s Maoist movement, a group of whom met with Mao Zedong and intelligence chief Kang Sheng in 1967.78 Pakistan’s support, mostly run out of East Pakistan, went back even further, and it was the Pakistani military that would make some of China’s early connections. In 1962, when one of the Naga militants stopped over in Karachi en route to meet with the exiled leader of his group in London, his Pakistani hosts introduced him to a “Chinese friend”, who promised aid and military assistance.79 Five years later, China came through on its promise: Beijing went on to train groups of Naga fighters in western Yunnan, who made their way there through the jungles of northern Burma80 and returned to India equipped with assault rifles, machines guns, and rocket launchers.81 In May 1969, China and Pakistan established a coordination bureau “to oversee the supply of arms, training and funding” to the various insurgent groups.82 While formal state assistance to the north-eastern insurgencies was cut off under Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese military has never backed away entirely, with arms continuing to flow from China too freely to be dismissed as the work of a few rogue salesmen. The seizure of a mammoth haul of illicit Chinese weapons in Bangladesh in 2004, destined for Naga and Assam groups, was the biggest in Bangladeshi history.83

  On an even larger scale, however, and of deeper lasting consequence, was the joint effort to help the mujahideen in the 1980s against the Soviet Union. Beijing supplied a large share of the guns and ammunition that would arm the mujahideen’s efforts, paid for by the United States and Saudi Arabia, and managed by Pakistan, whose intelligence services ran the campaign, trained the fighters, and mostly controlled who received the weapons.84 For the United States and China the primary focus was the Soviet Union, but Pakistan had a longer-term agenda, one even more central to its national goals. Not only could the Pakistani military systematically test out the use of irregular forces in Afghanistan, a country where it was keen to acquire “strategic depth”, but the influx of weapons, men and money could be readily redeployed eastward.85

  Kashmir had been in General Zia’s mind from the very inception of the war. In early 1980, Zia met Maulana Abdul Bari, a JI leader who had been involved in the 1965 operations.86 He told Bari that the Afghanistan campaign was a means to “prepare the ground” for a larger conflict in Kashmir, and that ammunition and financing from it would be diverted to the Kashmiri cause.87 When asked who in the Afghan campaign would receive the biggest share of arms and financial assistance, he replied: “Whoever trains the boys from Kashmir”.88 JI and Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front volunteers would indeed receive training at ISI camps in the 1980s.89 When the opportunity came to redirect resources in Afghanistan more decisively towards Kashmir after the Soviet withdrawal, it was the camps in Afghanistan under the control of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami, Pakistan’s favoured faction among the mujahideen, that provided the initial flow of fighters. The training facilities in Paktia brought together the Arab, Afghan and Kashmiri guerrillas who would later show up in Indian territory with the very same Chinese-made weapons that had been supplied to arm the anti-Soviet campaign.90 The United States was sufficiently concerned about the redirection of arms that it warned the Indians about the risk to politicians and government officials visiting Kashmir, who they feared might be targeted by the long-range sniper rifles that had been sent to Pakistan to kill Soviet military officers.91

  The cross-pollination of personnel, financing, training, weapons, and ideology between these different militant organizations—Afghan, Kashmiri, sectarian, and global terror groups such as Al Qaeda—would eventually metastasize beyond the control of the Pakistani government, but for much of the 1990s they worked hand in glove. The legacy of the 1980s was not simply the rise of well-trained, well-armed militant groups, but the rise of the state apparatus to manage them. Across the period, the ISI would emerge as the force it is today, changing from a backwater institution to a financially flush and autonomous powerhouse in Pakistan, which established and consolidated control over the Kashmiri militant groups and many of the forces involved in the Afghan campaign.92 This was not a one-way process. Over time, the line between the objectives of the Pakistani state and those of the Islamic militants blurred. Some individuals in the security services started to demonstrate as much affinity with the extremists, all the more so when they became “former” agents who maintained close liaison relationships with both the militants and their previous employer.93 As Hamid Gul, one of the leading examples of this phenomenon, stated when asked about his plans to maintain training camps for the mujahideen after the Soviet withdrawal: “We are fighting a jihad, and this is the first Islamic international brigade in the modern era. The Communists have their international brigades, the West has NATO, why can’t the Muslims unite and form a common front?”94 At the time he was still the chief of the ISI.

  This creeping reverse influence took place in concert with Zia ul Haq’s broader Islamization agenda. One of his first moves as army chief was to change the army’s motto from Jinnah’s “Unity, Faith, and Discipline” to “Faith, Piety, and Struggle in the Path of Allah”.95 Zia allowed members of the fundamentalist organization Tablighi Jamaat to preach at the Pakistani Military Academy, encouraged commanders to join their troops in congregational prayers, and instituted assessments of troops’ religiosity.96 He changed the recruitment patterns for the military, drawing in larger numbers of lower-middle class recruits—who were seen as more vulnerable for targeting by JI and other religious organizations—rather than relying on the traditional military families.97 The lines were perhaps at their fuzziest in the case of the Taliban. In one sense the Taliban were the ultimate ISI asset, financed and militarily supported by literally hundreds of Pakistani advisers in their campaign to consolidate control in Afghanistan.98 In many other respects, though, they exacerbated precisely the problems they were supposed to solve—fostering Pashtun nationalism rather than calming it, bolstering militants in Pakistan rather than redirecting their attention, and ideologically influencing elements in the Pakistani army rather than operating under their control.99 One retired ISI officer said that the ISI’s operatives in Afghanistan “became more Taliban than the Taliban”.100 Beijing would ultimately come to view these developments—the rise of Pakistani-supported militant groups, the changing nature of the Pakistani army, and the “Talibanization” of Pakistan—with greater and greater unease, but that was a long way off. In the 1990s, while China treated growing extremism in the region as a matter of concern, it still seemed that the nexus between the militants and the Pakistani military could be used to its advantage.

  Despite their religious bonds, the situation of the Uighurs has hardly been a cause célèbre in Pakistan or the wider Muslim world. Located at the far fringes of Islam’s heartlands, “East Turkestan” does not even feature on many purported maps of the Caliphate. What concern there is for the Uighurs’ situation has tended to come mostly from Turkic compatriots in Central Asia, Germany, and Turkey itself, rather than from South Asia or the Middle East. In Pakistan, Xinjiang’s low status in the hierarchy of popular causes is compounded by the fact that relations with China are seen as simply too important to allow a few disaffected Uighurs to get in the way. Even Pakistani religious groups have been willing to minimize their significance for the sake of ties with Beijing—as Hussain Haqqani notes: “Magazines and newspapers associat
ed with the Jamaat-e-Islami amplified the theme that Muslims around the world had an obligation to free their coreligionists from Soviet communist occupation. Muslims in Eastern Turkistan—China’s Xinjiang province—were also initially identified for liberation, but the development of close ties between China and Pakistan made their liberation a lesser priority.”101 Mosque closures, destruction of religious texts, restrictions on Islamic education, bans on fasting during Ramadan, and other measures meted out to the Uighurs by the Chinese state over the years have never mobilized angry street protests in Pakistan in the way they would if a Western power were responsible.102 There have been attempts to reconcile this uncomfortable trade-off between religious solidarity and geopolitical necessity. Pakistani criticism of the Uighurs’ irreligiousness or fondness for drink (for which Uighurs criticize Pakistanis too) casts aspersions on their standing as Muslims.103 Conspiracy theorists claim that Turkistan separatists are supported by the United States or India in order to drive a wedge between China and Pakistan.104 Either way, when it comes to dealing with the Uighurs, Islamabad has always been willing to act at Beijing’s behest.

  At times the Pakistani government has addressed the issue very directly, whether cracking down on Uighurs whose terrorist credentials were at best thin, or working to restrict the flows of people, propaganda and arms across the border to China. In the late 1990s, the community centres in Rawalpindi, Kashgarabad and Hotanabad were closed down, leaving hundreds of Uighurs homeless.105 Uighur students, whom China claimed were responsible for a series of bombings in 1997, were deported,106 and there are claims that the Pakistani military executed a number of Uighurs at a training camp.107 The ecosystem of Islamic militancy in the region that Pakistan fostered was more open to their Uighur co-religionists, however. Extremist groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan may not always have been willing to support terrorist operations in China itself, or to take up the “East Turkistan” cause in a serious way, but they have been happy to welcome the additional recruits to the jihadi movement. The Pakistani government sought to manage this, translating its relationships with militants into a channel that could be utilized on Beijing’s behalf. The ISI used its influence to dissuade the groups that it sponsored from directing any of their energies towards China. It also facilitated meetings for Chinese officials and intelligence agents to strike deals with whomever they needed to in order to isolate the Uighur militants from potential supporters among extremist organizations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.108