The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics
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While ETIM and its supporters were supposed to constitute China’s main terrorist threat, there was no question that it was the United States that was proving to be their most lethal opponent. Yet this was a role that should have been occupied by Pakistan: all the names on China’s “most wanted” list were believed to be living on Pakistani soil. In 2003, Pakistan’s army had been able to claim the credit for taking out the previous ETIM leader, Hahsan Mahsum, in an operation in South Waziristan.14 But since then, it had not been delivering results. The eight-man target list that China issued in 2008 was made public partly as a dig, published as it was on the eve of President Zardari’s visit to Beijing, and partly as a gesture of despair. The Pakistanis had been sitting on the names for years and nothing seemed to have been happening. Pakistan handed over nine Uighur militants to the Chinese in 2009, but as long as members of ETIM’s top leadership were operating in territory controlled by groups that Pakistan considered to be the “good Taliban,” they appeared to be safe.15 Then the US drone campaign began in earnest. ETIM’s leaders were both killed in locations that Pakistan had been unwilling to touch—a region in North Waziristan under the authority of a Taliban commander, Hafiz Gul Bahadar,16 who was linked to the ISI-sponsored Haqqani network17 and periodically engaged in peace deals with the Pakistani army.18 US officials roundly denied that Washington was doing any of this for Beijing’s benefit. But it was hard to escape the fact that the United States had done more to support the elimination of “anti-Chinese elements” in Pakistan in two years than the Pakistani government had in ten. Pakistani officials were sheepish: “It may have taken a U.S. missile to kill one of China’s most wanted Muslim separatists. But still, the Chinese probably see this as a good development,” as one Pakistani security official put it.19 The Chinese wondered, nonetheless, why they were relying on their strategic rival to accomplish the task rather than the country that was supposed to be their closest friend.
Since 9/11, the mantra that the United States and China have common objectives in the region is one that Beijing has been happy enough to recite without really believing it to be true. Both sides could agree that “stability” was good and “terrorism” was bad, but at any level of specificity, the picture quickly became clouded. Beijing’s counter-terrorism strategy has been essentially parasitic on the United States being a more important target for transnational militant groups than China. With the exception of ETIM and its supporters, Beijing’s interest was not to embroil itself in a battle with extremists in the region, it was to ensure that it didn’t get on the wrong side of them. That meant steering well clear of whichever side the United States was on. “Stability” in Afghanistan was not especially appealing to the Chinese either, if it just meant a stable environment for the United States to entrench its military presence.20 China was far happier to see the US army embroiled in a series of debilitating wars across the Middle East and South-West Asia than either of the alternatives—a successful consolidation of US power in the region, or a heightened US focus on East Asia. Yet in the period since President Obama took office, there is no doubt that the two sides have moved much closer together in both their dealings and their views on the region. From a starting point where China seemed determined not to involve itself in Afghanistan, was unwilling to engage in meaningful exchanges about Pakistan, and refused any bilateral cooperation with the United States in either country, it has reversed its position on all counts. The basic reasons for this are clear enough: the United States is withdrawing from Afghanistan, and the aftermath looks worrying. Without the geopolitical threat of “encirclement” by US bases that had such a hold on China’s strategic imagination, Beijing has started to view the future of the region through a very different prism. But it has been the security developments in Pakistan that have had the most potent impact. China’s doubts over Pakistan’s handling of militancy within its borders, whether ETIM, the TTP, or the longer-term threat posed by the creeping advance of extremism in Pakistani society, have led it discreetly to find common cause with Washington on a growing array of issues there. One former senior US diplomat stated: “There used to be a group of countries that China wasn’t willing to talk to us about properly. Pakistan is the only one that’s left.”21 Within a few more years, that may no longer be true.
For veterans of the US-China relationship, any talk of Pakistan conjures up an almost nostalgic sense of the two periods during which the country was at the heart of bilateral relations, and those relations themselves were in their warmest phase. First, when Islamabad was playing its discreet and vital role as matchmaker, in the secret diplomacy of the 1970s, to bring Washington and Beijing together, and second, in the 1980s when the triumvirate were in their quasi-alliance against the Soviet Union. Across nearly two decades, China and the United States shared an interest in Pakistan’s fate and believed that some degree of synchronization of messages and support might be helpful. After the anxious efforts at coordination during the 1971 war, detailed in the first chapter, Chinese officials consistently urged their US counterparts to give Pakistan more aid and better weapons than China could provide itself, and even weighed in on Pakistani politics. American and Chinese leaders compared notes on the messages the two sides were sending to Zia ul-Haq about the situation of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, whom neither side wanted to see executed, and even whether China might offer him asylum (Deng: “If he wants to come, then we will be prepared to receive him”. Brzezinski: “He could use the same villa as Sihanouk did!” Deng: “I think he has a better place.”).22 But in subsequent decades, the China-Pakistan relationship would disappear into a secretive space from which it has still not fully emerged.
Following the end of the Afghanistan campaign, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the Tiananmen Square protests, both Sino-US relations and US-Pakistan relations took a sharply negative turn. After more than a decade of turning a blind eye to Pakistan’s nuclear programme, there was no longer a strong enough political imperative for Washington to continue to do so. And China was no longer a Cold War friend but a country that suddenly looked like it was on the wrong side of history, and potentially an economic and military rival over the long term to boot. China and Pakistan had enjoyed relatively healthy military-military ties with the United States, but suddenly saw arms supplies cut off and sanctions imposed. Pakistan was the third largest recipient of US aid behind Egypt and Israel, most of it being military aid; in 1990 it was abruptly stopped.23 The Pressler Amendment required American assistance to be cut off if the administration failed to certify that Pakistan was not in possession of a nuclear device, a position that became virtually impossible to maintain. US military sales to China were suspended the day after the world watched the PLA’s tanks and machine guns trained on unarmed students.24
In the 1990s, when Pakistan featured in US-China exchanges it was largely for one reason—nuclear proliferation. From the M-11 missiles to the 5,000 ring magnets destined for the nuclear weapons facilities at Kahuta, Chinese assistance to Pakistan’s nuclear and missile programmes was a constant source of US criticism and sanction.25 For a Chinese military that was starting to see the United States taking the place of the Soviet Union as its primary threat, arms sales and security cooperation with Pakistan now required protection from US pressure and scrutiny, rather than being part of the continuum of the three sides’ cooperation. This was a relationship that was moving even more firmly under the control of the Chinese military, the defence companies linked to it, and China’s security services. Their mentality was highly defensive. The notorious line about Pakistan being “China’s Israel”—part explanation, part sarcastic jibe—was delivered by its military intelligence chief after one too many meetings with US counterparts on the subject.26 There was also a sense in Washington that Chinese missile sales to Pakistan were carefully timed to take the form of retaliation for moves on the US side, such as the F-16 sales to Taiwan in 1992.27
For Beijing and Washington, the 1998 nuclear tests and the Kargil crisis of 1999 did brin
g about a certain shift in South Asia’s status: the threat of war in the region was treated as a joint US-Chinese security concern for the first time since the 1970s, and China’s special relationship with Pakistan was seen to provide a helpful source of leverage rather than just a proliferation problem. But 9/11 had a far more significant impact. While China was uneasy about the scale of the US military and intelligence footprint in Pakistan, it also meant that Washington was resuming the role that Beijing wanted to see it play: providing the arms and aid to Pakistan that would bolster its capabilities against India, and bringing the country out of the near-pariah status that it had flirted with at points in the 1990s. Despite its initial reservations, for much of the George W. Bush administration the arrangement suited China quite well. The United States shifted strategic focus from Afghanistan to Iraq relatively quickly, moderating Chinese fears about its presence in the region, but was still delivering huge packages of military assistance to Pakistan. Despite the United States’ best efforts, China almost certainly got a look at some of the US kit too.28 And with Pakistan now being granted the status of “major non-NATO ally” by the US government, the China-Pakistan relationship, which had been perceived in a largely nefarious light for the previous decade, was now treated in more neutral terms. Beijing still faced continued US pressure over its dealings with the likes of Iran—but no longer with Pakistan, whose rogue state days were over, at least for a while.
Sino-American consultations did take place during times of crisis. Beijing was asked by Washington to play a role in reducing tensions during the so-called “Twin Peaks” crisis of 2001/2, when India and Pakistan were on the verge of war, and in the aftermath of the 2008 Mumbai attacks.29 When Pakistan faced a financial crisis that same year, the United States also encouraged China to steer Pakistan towards an IMF programme rather than bailing it out, and Beijing was more than happy to oblige.30 A regular South Asia dialogue was established at assistant secretary level as part of the array of US-China bilateral talks that were put in place covering different regions of the world under the auspices of the “strategic dialogue”.31 For most of the officials who had been involved in the exchanges with the Chinese, though, the view was pretty uniform: outside the context of acute peril for Pakistan, China wouldn’t talk about the country and its problems seriously, particularly when it came to the question of its support to militant groups. At best it was willing to play a “water carrier” role, passing on messages about US concern but not reinforcing them with matching expressions of its own.32
Until the very final period of Musharraf ’s tenure, this didn’t seem to matter much: South and South-West Asia were a long way down the list of issues featuring on the US-China bilateral agenda, and Beijing’s unwillingness to be helpful was a matter of at most, minor regret. But by the time the Obama administration came to office, Pakistan and Afghanistan were gripped by a near-constant sense of crisis. The insurgency in Afghanistan was drawing the United States back into full war-fighting mode. The insurgency in Pakistan itself was spreading from the tribal areas, and convulsing its major cities with terrorist violence.33 And the political and economic situation was unravelling. Musharraf ’s last, chaotic year in office saw popular mass protest movements, the imposition of martial law, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and the beginnings of a full-blown financial meltdown.34 By 2009, any pretence that the US problem in the region was just a few foreign fighters hiding out in the tribal areas had also evaporated. Instead, it was now the entire ecosystem of militancy, from the Southern Punjab to the ISI’s extremist-sponsoring S Wing, and the political environment that sustained them that were in the US crosshairs.35 The very nature of Pakistani society, education, politics, and the military seemed to be treated as a legitimate matter of concern by US policymakers as they contemplated the world’s only fragile nuclear-armed state. And however quiet they were about it, Pakistan’s stability was becoming a subject of anxiety for policymakers in China too.
At the start of 2009, Chinese officials were preparing for Afghanistan and Pakistan to take a serious place in the US-China conversation again. The 2008 presidential election, with its talk of the “right war”36 and the “war of necessity”, seemed to have staked Afghanistan out as a subject of heightened focus for the incoming president.37 Chinese officials knew that they had assets in both countries, not least their position of special influence in Pakistan, and were anticipating—and somewhat fearing—that they would be asked to deploy them.38 Officials from the new Obama administration were not expecting a dramatic change in China’s approach, but it was hoped that the scale of the crisis in Pakistan, the reframing of US Afghanistan policy to place it in a more regional context,39 and the simple fact that “Af-Pak” was being accorded an elevated status in US foreign policy might make Beijing more willing to be cooperative.40 Chinese officials were somewhat surprised by the first request they received, to open up Chinese territory for non-lethal supplies to support the coalition effort in Afghanistan.41 For some US officials, this would be a symbolic measure—to demonstrate the fact that the two sides could now be military partners, and overcome the deep, residual Chinese suspicion that the American presence in the region had some ulterior, China-directed motive in mind.42 But many on the Chinese side remained suspicious.43 It didn’t seem that China could be particularly useful, given the absence of a direct transport route to Afghanistan—supplies would still have to make their way through Central Asia—and the risks of being visibly associated with the NATO war effort were substantial. Yet for logisticians on the US side, the China route had practical advantages, and for the strategists it reduced the risk of relying on Russia for the Northern Distribution Network. Discussions went all the way down to the question of whether Ford Ranger pickup trucks, made in Thailand and destined for the Afghan police, were a “non-lethal” supply44 but eventually petered out, especially after the July 2009 riots in Xinjiang elevated Chinese fears about the reaction across the Muslim world, and even from its own population.45 The US arms sales package to Taiwan in January 2010 definitively ended the discussion.
But the more pressing matter during the first year of the new administration was Pakistan. By April 2009, the Pakistani Taliban had taken control of Swat Valley, and moved within 100km of Islamabad.46 The new US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, stated that the Taliban advance posed “an existential threat”, and urged Pakistanis to “speak out forcefully against a policy that is ceding more and more territory to the insurgents”.47 It was hoped that China, if it truly appreciated the scale of the crisis, could lean on its old friends and make them see sense: that it was high time the Pakistani military struck back, diverting the necessary troops from its eastern frontier. Chinese officials listened—but were dismissive. They were happy to talk about Pakistan but suggested that the threat was hyped.48 What the Chinese heard from the Pakistani military was more reassuring, and while they were happy to provide any additional equipment or supplies if the Pakistanis asked for them, and continue their bilateral assistance, they saw no reason to interfere. When the State Department gave a proposal to its counterparts in the Chinese foreign ministry for cooperation on stabilizing Afghanistan and Pakistan, US officials were told that the Pakistan part of it would not even be considered.49 If anything, Washington’s worries were themselves a source of Chinese concern. While the Taliban advance might be a problem, the possibility of the United States deciding that Pakistan could no longer be trusted with its nuclear weapons was in some ways a greater one. Every statement coming out of Washington fretting about the security of Pakistani nuclear facilities or a “failing” Pakistani state rang alarm bells in Beijing, in a way that even the possible diversion of nuclear materials did not.50 As one Chinese official put it: “If terrorists did get hold of nuclear weapons, we’re certainly not going to be their first target.”51 Nonetheless, despite their outwardly sanguine stance in bilateral meetings with the Americans, the Chinese had been thinking about the subject ever more seriously.
The Chin
ese military’s planning for major crises in neighbouring states is a subject as sensitive as it is secretive.52 North Korean and Pakistani generals have operated for years under the supposition that US defence planners are poised to seize the right opportunity to swoop in and grab their nuclear assets. American officials make little attempt to conceal their concerns about the implications of state fragility or failure in either country. But China is a great deal less comfortable spooking its friends and allies with that kind of speculation, and Washington’s efforts to draw Beijing into discreet discussions about contingency planning have been routinely rebuffed.53 However, for crisis planners in the Chinese military, their friends are one of the main sources of concern.