The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics

by Andrew Small

  As a result of its own concerns with domestic terrorism, China has often been portrayed as if it is naturally aligned with states facing similar threats. In many respects, however, its security has been parasitic on the fact that these groups consider the United States, India and other countries to be higher priority targets. Beijing’s preference has been to make offers, not enemies. Its pitch to Islamic militants in the region generally took the same form: don’t bother us and we won’t bother you. Depending on who China was talking to, money or the offer of small arms supplies might be put on the table too.109 In return, Beijing expected that not only would the groups themselves refrain from targeting China, they would also refuse any support to Uighur organizations that did.110 China’s efforts were wide-ranging. At one end of the spectrum were the Pakistani religious parties who trooped to Beijing in 2000 to declare their support and friendship; their madrassas and training camps had been used by Uighurs,111 and China wanted that stopped.112 With the Taliban, whose relationship with Beijing is explained in greater depth in Chapter 6, China reached an understanding: Afghanistan would not be used as a base for ETIM attacks, and Beijing would gradually move towards the normalization of relations with the largely isolated Taliban government, including vital economic support.113 Chinese intelligence agents are even believed to have met Al Qaeda to sound out its intentions.114 In the 1990s those intentions were certainly not hostile. Osama Bin Laden went as far as to refer to China in his public statements, claiming in 1997: “The United States wants to incite conflict between China and the Muslims. The Muslims of Xinjiang are being blamed for the bomb blasts in Beijing. But I think these explosions were sponsored by the American CIA. If Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and China get united, the United States and India will become ineffective.’’ He went on to say, “I often hear about Chinese Muslims, but since we have no direct connection with people in China and no member of our organisation comes from China, I don’t have any detailed knowledge about them.”115 For Al Qaeda, as for other jihadi groups, the default position was that it was better to avoid taking Beijing on. Not only did they have quite enough enemies already, but as Bin Laden’s remarks suggest, there was also the sense that China and the jihadis had a couple of adversaries in common.

  At the turn of the millennium, developments seemed to be moving in China’s favour. Beijing had reached a modus vivendi with the Taliban, ensuring that ETIM was largely forced to embed itself with the IMU rather than running its own autonomous camps.116 Governments across the region had supported China’s crackdown on even peaceful Uighur political activities. Rather than taking up the Uighur cause, militants across the region seemed willing to give China a pass. The large-scale attacks in Xinjiang that had taken place virtually every year in the preceding decade had stopped in 1999.117 Not only did Beijing’s brutal pacification campaign appear to have worked, it did so without resulting in any serious blowback in the wider Islamic world. The 9/11 attacks did not derail these developments—instead, they just presented a golden opportunity to work the other side. After years of fruitless lobbying by the United States and other sceptical foreign governments to designate ETIM as a terrorist group, the credibility threshold shifted. In January 2002 the Information Office of the State Council, the equivalent of China’s cabinet, released a dossier entitled “East Turkistan Terrorist Forces Cannot Get Away with Impunity” that still provides the basis for many of the claims circulated about them today.118 The document lists bombings, assassinations, industrial sabotage and other attacks resulting in 162 deaths over the prior decade. Many experts on Xinjiang question the veracity of its claims, but in August 2002, US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage announced that the United States considered ETIM a terrorist organization and would freeze any assets it held in the United States.119 In September, the UN followed suit.120 The group was now on the run anyway, as the US invasion of Afghanistan destroyed its base of operations. ETIM’s basic camp at Tora Bora—described in one report as “a primitive hamlet with only one Kalashnikov rifle”—where some Uighurs received simple training, was rolled up and a number of its residents ended up in Guantánamo Bay.121 The IMU itself was also significantly depleted, with many members killed in Northern Afghanistan, including the group’s leader, Juma Namangani.122 Others, including most of those at Tora Bora, fled across the border to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, which would become ETIM’s home for the next decade.123

  The forced escape across the Hindu Kush was a mixed blessing for China. In theory, it meant that the Chinese could now go through the Pakistanis directly when they wanted a problem dealt with, rather than through a more complex set of interactions with the Taliban. 2003 saw an early success that seemed to confirm this view—ETIM’s leader, Hasan Mahsum, was killed by the Pakistani army during a raid in South Waziristan.124 The more restricted geographical focus—Uighur militants were almost entirely based in a single FATA agency—made it easier for China to establish its own intelligence networks to inform on them.125 But the location posed other problems. The Pakistani security forces were very reluctant to conduct operations there on a significant scale, lest it upset the delicate balance of its relationships with various tribes and militant groups in the region. The dense network of terrorist organizations in FATA also provided a base from which ETIM could professionalize and project itself more effectively. For all the Chinese government’s claims about the threat it posed, its track record at the time was extremely thin. The very point at which ETIM was designated a terrorist organization in 2002 was the point at which many experts asked whether it existed at all.126 Some Chinese counter-terrorism experts started to raise more concerns about Hizb-ut-Tahrir—a transnational organization that was expanding its influence in Xinjiang127—than ETIM, which seemed to have been virtually wiped off the map. It would be six years before it proved otherwise.128

  In 2008 a group called the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) hit the airwaves. In a series of videos, a masked man, believed to be either ETIM’s “overall” leader, Abdul Haq al-Turkestani, or its military commander, Emeti Yakuf, appeared making threats to the Olympic Games that were due to be held in Beijing later that year.129 They featured burning Olympics logos and hooded men in military fatigues, who warned visitors (“particularly the Muslims”) not to attend the Games.130 The propaganda material and videos were notable for being coordinated by Al Fajr, the jihadist media forum run by Al Qaeda, giving them a reach—including Arabic translations—that had previously eluded the group.131 That same year, China would also experience the first successful terrorist attacks in Xinjiang in a decade.

  There were a couple of false starts. In January 2008, Chinese authorities claimed to have raided a bomb-making facility and arms cache in Urumqi.132 Then, in March, a flight from Urumqi to Beijing had to make an emergency landing in Lanzhou after a 19-year-old Uighur woman was caught leaving two soft-drink cans filled with petrol in a toilet cubicle, attracting the attention of a flight attendant who noticed the smell and the woman’s “suspiciously emotional state”.133 Reports citing Chinese sources claim that the woman and her Central Asian travelling companion were carrying Pakistani passports, and that a third member of the group, who escaped, was a Pakistani national.134 “This was a well prepared, meticulously planned, tightly coordinated, terror attack activity,” asserted the Global Times newspaper, stating that as a frequent traveller through Urumqi airport, the woman had “lulled the security guards into complaisance”.135 Subsequent accounts suggest that the woman, Guazlinur Turdi, had “spent a significant amount of time in Pakistan” and that the third suspect, a Pakistani man who was detained a week later, had “masterminded” and “instigated” the attack.136

  Pakistan, which was already coordinating closely with China on security for the Olympics, made an additional public show of assistance. General Musharraf, who was due to visit China shortly afterwards, included a stopover in Urumqi at Beijing’s request, a visible demonstration of support for Chinese policy in Xinjiang.137 Pakist
ani officials claimed to have blocked “all the key border crossings” between Pakistan and the restive province in order to “prevent militants coming into the country”.138

  Veteran China watchers remained suspicious: the low-tech plane incident sounded as if it might have been inflated by the Chinese government to justify heavy-handed security measures around the Olympics or another crackdown in Xinjiang. Yet, low-tech methods of this sort were in fact the hallmark of a new wave of attacks.

  On 4 August 2008, four days before the opening ceremony of the Games, two men armed with knives and explosives drove a truck into a squad of border patrol police officers in Kashgar, killing sixteen of them.139 The driver attempted to throw a home-made explosive device at the group, but it blew up in his hand. Another attacker hurled primitive explosives at the gates of the police station. Two more incidents in Western Xinjiang—a stabbing of security officers and a bomb attack on government offices—took place within the next ten days.140 The last effective attack in Xinjiang had been in 1999; the subsequent five years saw a series of incidents involving knives, axes, and primitive bombs directed at government installations and ordinary Han Chinese in Kashgar, Hotan and Turfan.141 Now, after a long hiatus it seemed that terrorist violence had returned to Xinjiang. “We find these tactics much more difficult to deal with,” noted a Chinese Public Security Bureau official working on counter-terrorist strategy in the province. “We have been able to stop the larger plots in the past but these attacks are harder to predict.”142

  What was far less clear was whether the Turkistan Islamic Party was actually involved. The primitive nature of the attacks was effective, and may have required some level of coordination and planning, but certainly didn’t require weapons training in Waziristan. In their pre-Olympics propaganda videos, the TIP had claimed responsibility for various small-scale explosions in cities such as Shanghai, Kunming and Guangzhou, but even the Chinese government, often so eager to pin blame on nefarious East Turkistan separatists, drew the line at allowing the group to take credit for bus fires that it had nothing to do with.143 The TIP made no comment on the 2008 attacks, and the presumption was that they were indigenous in nature rather than imports from Pakistan. Two years later, however, after a set of attacks in Kashgar, the eagerness to blame—and to take credit—was far more pronounced.

  On 30 July 2011, two knife-wielding men hijacked a truck and drove it into groups of people at a busy Kashgar night-market before jumping out and stabbing pedestrians. At least eight people were killed before the crowd managed to overpower the attackers, one of whom they beat to death.144 The following day, a group of twelve Uighur men attacked a restaurant in “Gourmet Food Street”, a Han Chinese area, throwing explosives into the crowded eatery and then attacking the fleeing patrons with knives.145 At least six people were killed before police arrived at the scene. The finger-pointing began almost immediately. The Kashgar city government quickly claimed that an initial probe had showed that one of the men involved had confessed to receiving explosives and firearms training in ETIM camps in Pakistan.146 This was unusual—while the Chinese government was more than happy to attribute attacks to ETIM, the fact that the group’s training facilities were on Pakistani territory was a fact that was normally politely glossed over. It was sufficiently serious for the ISI chief, Ahmed Shuja Pasha, to fly to China to discuss the situation in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.147 Five Uighurs were subsequently arrested in Pakistan and deported to China.148 The TIP claimed responsibility for the attacks in a video released a couple of months later, which appeared to show one of the perpetrators at a Waziristan training camp.149

  The story was not as clear-cut as it appeared: Chinese counter-terrorism experts in Beijing didn’t believe that ETIM/TIP had a great deal to do with the events in Kashgar. Their assessment was that this was a convenient piece of blame deflection from a local government that was seeking to shirk responsibility for the deteriorating security situation in Xinjiang.150 One Uighur scholar who visited Kashgar and Hotan in the aftermath stated that the perpetrators had “grievances but no training”, remarking that: “I doubt that the attackers were trained in Pakistan… They were all locals, from Hotan and Kashgar, and only armed with knives, and had no weapons.”151 That view was ultimately reflected in a statement from the Chinese foreign ministry in October, which stated the attackers had been trained and armed locally, not in Pakistan.152 The sense that this had become a political football was reinforced when Xinjiang’s top government official, Nur Bekri, claimed to the press during a major gathering of Chinese provincial and national leaders in 2012 that there were “countless links” between “East Turkestan activists and terrorists from our neighbouring country”.153 Again, it appeared to be an embarrassment for Pakistan but, again, the statements were coming not from the central government but from Xinjiang, where officials were under significant political pressure: the province was being roiled by tensions that went far beyond the capacity of a small number of militants holed up in North Waziristan.

  On 5 July 2009, Urumqi had experienced the worst communal violence to take place in China in several decades. A protest over the killing of two Uighurs in Guangdong blew the lid off years of accumulated grievances and resentments between Han Chinese and Uighurs. The protest escalated into rioting, which saw “marauding gangs” of Uighur men slashing, stabbing and beating Han Chinese in a bloody rampage.154 It echoed the Lhasa riots the previous year, in which Tibetan rioters burned and looted Han shops, but this was far deadlier—official Chinese estimates put the death toll at 197 and others place it much higher. By the time Han vigilante groups had mobilized, a heavy security presence had locked down much of the city, though not enough to prevent reprisal killings.155 Officials quickly blamed the events on the World Uighur Congress and its “close links with terrorist organizations”, while Uighur political groups blamed heavy-handed behaviour by the Chinese government.156 Both accounts underplayed the disturbing level of inter-communal tension that the explosion of violence exhibited.

  The 5 July events left deep wounds in Xinjiang and placed Chinese policies in the province under the closest scrutiny they had faced since the 1990s. The Xinjiang police chief and Urumqi party secretary were both sacked,157 and the longstanding party secretary of the province, Wang Lequan, seen as the architect of the Chinese government’s hard-line approach over nearly two decades, was removed from his position.158 The pressures were not just internal but international. Hu Jintao was forced to leave the l’Aquila G8 summit early to go back to China and manage the problem.159 The Turkish prime minister denounced the events as “a kind of genocide”.160 Beijing went into a diplomatic frenzy trying to shut down a motion at the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) condemning China’s response to the violence and its treatment of Muslims, and to prevent the secretary general of the OIC from visiting Xinjiang (unsuccessfully in the latter case).161 The Uighur issue also appeared to be firmly on the radar of the transnational terror groups who had previously tended to ignore it. Al Qaeda issued its first threats directed at China, with propaganda chief Abu Yahya Al Libi, from Pakistani soil, calling on “our Muslim brothers in Turkistan” to “seriously prepare for jihad”.162 Its offshoot, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, promised retaliatory attacks.163 And in March 2012, the Pakistani Taliban for the first time linked the killing of a Chinese national to “revenge for the Chinese government killing our Muslim brothers in the Xinjiang province”.164 Beijing’s efforts at deflecting attention from Xinjiang and keeping the issue low in the pecking order for transnational terrorist groups had once been remarkably effective. After 5 July, it looked as if this was going to be a great deal harder.

  Heightened tensions in Xinjiang, concerns over ETIM safe havens, anxieties over whether militant groups in the region might turn on China: this was a scenario that smacked of the 1990s. Beijing instinctively turned to its old playbook: pushing Pakistan to crack down on Uighur groups; using the ISI’s reach into the world of militancy to dissuade them fr
om attacks; and approaching militants through other intermediaries in Pakistan. The problem was that none of these levers worked the same way that they did ten years before.

  Few people illuminate China’s problem more clearly than the man Beijing invited to the Chinese Communist Party’s International Department in April 2010. Maulana Fazal-ur Rehman, whose photo with Wang Yang, now one of China’s four vice-premiers, is cheerfully displayed on the IDCPC’s website, would have seemed a natural person to approach.165 For the last two decades, Fazal-ur-Rehman had managed to straddle the worlds of militancy and mainstream Pakistani politics. In the 1990s, he was chair of the national assembly’s Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, where he spent much of his time lobbying and deal-making for the Taliban.166 In 2006, he was the man Musharraf turned to when he needed support for the Pakistani government’s efforts to strike peace deals with the militant groups that would go on to form the TTP.167 In 2007, it was the Chinese themselves who were desperately seeking his support to help secure the release of the Red Mosque hostages. But in the aftermath of the Lal Masjid operation, as the divide between the Pakistani government and the new wave of Pakistani militants widened, keeping a foot in both camps became a great deal harder. In April of that year, a mysterious rocket attack was launched on his home in Dera Ismail Khan.168 A few months later, Pakistani intelligence discovered Fazal-ur Rehman’s name on a Taliban hit list.169 In April 2011, he was the target of two attacks in two days.170 On the first occasion, a suicide bomber killed twelve and injured more than twenty members of a group waiting to welcome him in Swabi, barely minutes before he arrived. The next day, twelve more people were killed as another suicide bomber struck a police van providing security for Fazal-ur Rehman’s convoy in Charsadda. A few weeks later, Pakistani security officials confirmed that he was now “top of the new hit list prepared by the Taliban leadership”.171 By the time China had got round to cultivating him as a broker who could help navigate its own complex relationships with Islamic extremists, it was already too late.