The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics

by Andrew Small

  The Tiananmen Square attack was only the start. Within the next few months, China was shaken by a series of incidents that brought the menace of terrorism from its previous confines in the country’s remote northwest to its urban centres. The most shocking attack, on 1 March 2014, saw a group of eight black-clad, knife-wielding men and women stab 29 people to death in Kunming railway station, scenes darkly reminiscent of the Chechen-style assaults that few imagined would ever be seen in China. When Xi Jinping made his first presidential trip to Xinjiang a couple of months later, he called for “nets spread from the earth to the sky” to defend against terrorism. The Chinese security services were almost immediately embarrassed by their inability to prevent another bomb and knife attack from taking place, at Urumqi railway station, on the final day of his visit. It was the worst sequence of terrorist violence that China has faced in its modern history.

  There were immediate repercussions for Pakistan, although not for the major economic projects, which if anything were now even more important for China’s domestic security agenda. Li’s visit to South Asia was due to be followed in September 2014 by Xi himself, armed with near-final plans for the Silk Road Economic Belt, Maritime Silk Road, BCIM Economic Corridor, and—most importantly for Islamabad—the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. While political infighting would result in an embarrassing delay to Xi’s Pakistan visit, the one thing that the Sharif government, the Pakistani army, and Imran Khan agreed on was the value of a relationship with China that now promised to deliver tens of billions of dollars in investment, the new saviour of the Pakistani economy. But, at the same time, the urgency of Chinese calls to crack down on Uighur militants in their North Waziristan base had grown. Whether or not they were directly responsible for any of the attacks, Beijing believed that the propaganda operation being conducted out of FATA was itself helping to instigate the wave of violence. As the drumbeat of Chinese pressure intensified, the Pakistani army finally obliged, Raheel Sharif embarking on the campaign that his predecessor had resisted for so long. The army’s North Waziristan operation involved tens of thousands of troops and the displacement of nearly half a million people. It was triggered by an array of factors: an IMU attack on Karachi airport; the breakdown of the government’s talks with the Pakistani Taliban; and the need to consolidate Pakistan’s borders before the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. But, in an echo of the Red Mosque raid seven years earlier, there was also an irate China to consider, the one country whose requests few Pakistani army chiefs are comfortable turning down.

  The most obvious security issues that Beijing faces are to its east. Strategic competition with the United States largely plays out in the Asia Pacific. China’s historical rivalries are with its East Asian neighbours. The greatest risk of China becoming embroiled in a war is over its maritime disputes in the South China and East China Seas. These are the main testing grounds for China’s capacity and intentions as a great power. But they are also contests of choice, typically occurring at a time and manner of Beijing’s choosing. Shifts in the economic and military balance of power in the Asia Pacific have so far moved inexorably in China’s favour. It is Beijing’s impatience, its assertiveness, that is the greatest risk to China’s rising power. In China’s western neighbourhood, by contrast, it has been Beijing’s caution and its unwillingness to try to steer developments in a direction consonant with Chinese interest, that pose the greater problem. Xinjiang looks more and more like an Achilles heel, a vulnerability that is growing increasingly exposed as China’s rise continues. Even if the Pakistani army’s campaign succeeds in the narrow objective of displacing Uighur and IMU fighters from Pakistan itself, the problems for China in this respect continue to mount. Attacks in Xinjiang have become virtually a weekly occurrence. And Uighur militants, by now well networked across the jihadi world during their years in North Waziristan, have been appearing as far afield as Iraq and Syria fighting with the so-called Islamic State. Where Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar judiciously weighed the risks of taking China on as an enemy, the newer generation of militants, whether the TTP or ISIS, have had no such qualms. And unlike Beijing’s carefully calibrated escalations in East Asia, the threats emerging in its west have caught it looking seriously unprepared.

  The factors that are driving one form of Chinese assertiveness in East Asia are hence forcing a different response in South, South-West, Central Asia and beyond, to the Middle East. As a power in its near seas, China looks uncomfortably like a bully. As a land power, it looks like a potential anchor for a region that has struggled to break out of a set of vicious and debilitating rivalries. In the maritime realm, China is contesting the control of islands and overlapping exclusive economic zones with multiple claimants. Its land borders, by contrast, are almost entirely settled. The sole major outstanding dispute is with India and even India is likely to derive advantage from a greater Chinese willingness to address the security issues that stretch out from Xinjiang’s western borders.89 Over the last decade, Beijing has sat passively watching developments in the region that are inimical to its strategic interests. Now sitting on the sidelines no longer looks like the most prudent approach.

  The coming years present a potent constellation of threats but also an opportunity to shift the balance of incentives in the region to ensure that they don’t recur. One part of the task is economic: the grand trade and infrastructure projects that can integrate the region more closely with the East Asian growth phenomenon. Beijing hopes to unleash forces of trade, finance, and economic opportunity that have never had the chance to compete with the seemingly ineluctable logic of the region’s security rivalries. Yet the politics rely on Pakistan. Beijing needs a political settlement in Afghanistan, a stable relationship between Pakistan and India, and a settled security situation in Pakistan itself. China can dangle very large financial carrots that might help to persuade different actors there that the strategic trade-offs are worthwhile. It can invest its considerable diplomatic capacities. But the crucial decisions will be made in Islamabad and Rawalpindi—and it is already clear that they will require some pushing from Beijing if they are going to come out the way it would like.

  Yet for China, Pakistan’s importance in the longer term goes well beyond its central position in the volatile politics of its western neighbourhood. While the United States’ position as the pre-eminent global power is augmented by a decades-old alliance system that spans the Atlantic and the Pacific, and commands hundreds of overseas military installations that span the globe, Beijing can count its reliable friends on the fingers of one hand. The North Koreans have proved to be truculent and resentful, and are a standing risk to Chinese strategic interests in North-East Asia. The Burmese junta decided that China’s overweening role was too much to put up with, preferring political reform and an opening to the West to the risk of becoming a Chinese satrapy. Authoritarian affinity and a common cause in resisting Western hegemony have not yet eradicated the deep-seated mutual suspicion in the Russia-China relationship. From Iran to Sudan, Zimbabwe to Laos and Cambodia, so many of China’s other supposedly close relationships are fragile, reversible, and overly contingent on the continuation in power of a specific regime. Pakistan is the only friendship China has that has been tested out over decades, commands deep support from across the political spectrum and institutions of state, and has a base of public support that is so high that it is a striking outlier in any opinion survey of how China is perceived abroad.

  For the last couple of decades none of this added up to much more than an interesting footnote in Chinese foreign policy. Beijing was wedded to a non-aligned stance that dismissed alliance politics as “cold war thinking”. Outside its immediate neighbourhood, China’s primary interest was in advancing economic relationships, and Beijing had neither the inclination nor the capacity to send the PLA to help protect its citizens or its companies in far-flung places. This has now changed. The sheer scale of China’s economy has expanded its global footprint, provided the means to pay for a far lar
ger and more advanced military, and driven rising expectations from the public at home. Once a trading power, China has become an investing power too, with far greater exposure to the countries where its people and projects are present. Once a defensive military power with horizons that did not extend far beyond Taiwan, China has now had nearly a decade of preparing the PLA for “new historic missions” across the world.90 For these reasons alone, it is not a surprise that Beijing is carefully weighing up which countries it can trust to facilitate the global projection of Chinese power in the years to come. A “string of pearls” of ports and pipelines is all very well but which host governments will be politically ambivalent in a crisis and which military partners can it count on? Who would help China break Western embargoes if it found itself embroiled in a war in East Asia, and who would leave it in the lurch? Which intelligence agencies can it trust to penetrate the networks of transnational terrorism that are eyeing Chinese targets across the globe? Beijing would prefer to have a longer list of candidates, but when it evaluates whom it can consistently expect to find in its camp, there is a single name that recurs. As one Chinese expert stated: “If China decides to develop formal alliances, Pakistan would be the first place we would turn. It may be the only place we could turn”.91 China undoubtedly has its fears about the country’s long-term future. The challenge of dealing with a country that is both the greatest source of China’s terrorist threat and the crucial partner in combating it, is challenging to navigate. Pakistan cannot match the trade and commercial prospects of its larger, more economically successful neighbour. But friendship, the one commodity that Pakistan can offer China more convincingly than any other country, matters far more to Beijing than it used to. As a result, the China-Pakistan axis is almost ready to step out of the shadows.

  NOTE ON SOURCING

  The biggest challenge in the research process for this book was finding reliable sources. As the introduction indicates, the relationship spans areas of genuine sensitivity. Having previously conducted work on other delicate Chinese relationships—such as its ties with North Korea, Iran, Sudan, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, and Cuba—I found the level of care taken over the divulging of information notably higher when it came to dealing with Pakistan. The circumspection is explained partly because it is the only relationship in Chinese foreign policy that is essentially led by the PLA, with the significant additional involvement of the Chinese intelligence services. These are not institutions that are especially interested in handing over details to foreigners about an important bilateral security relationship. Although I was able to meet, for instance, the PLA’s Pakistan handlers, military intelligence officers who had run China’s Afghanistan operations, PSB officers in charge of counter-terrorism strategy in Xinjiang, and ministry of state security agents who had dealt with Taliban leaders, they were not necessarily keen to reveal many details. It is easy enough to have general discussions about Sino- Pak relations, but beyond things become more delicate. Matters of sensitivity included not only the predictable contemporary issues but various historical matters that remain contentious, from China’s involvement in the 1971 war to China’s support for the mujahideen in the 1980s. Certain topics covered in the text are a little delicate for other parties too—the subject of Sino-US Cold War defence and intelligence cooperation, for instance, is still not readily discussed.

  Despite some of these challenges, over time the iterative process of interviews that I undertook for the book yielded what I believe to be accurate versions of many of the crucial events described. I was able to meet people over a number of years, test many different accounts out against each other, and work out whose stories checked out against subsequent, verifiable events. Interview-based research processes can be problematic—if the interviews are conducted on a one-off basis, and thinly spread, it is possible to assemble some juicy tidbits and quotes but it can be difficult to determine the veracity of many of the claims. I think I was at least able to mitigate this problem. Most of the topics covered in the book benefited from the perspectives of multiple parties: officials from different sides, “watchers” close to the official processes in the countries in question, and outside observers with access to their own sources of information. It generally became clear who genuinely knew what they were talking about, whose analysis was borne out, who was able to provide independent corroboration, and who was reliant on the same source for their information. Given how thin the literature is on some of the crucial subjects, and the difficulties in getting access to archives, there was really no viable alternative to this research method.

  On many subjects, my presumption tended normally towards scepticism, but many of the claims that seemed sensational-sounding when they were first presented to me proved to be entirely well-founded. I heard a number of stories about Chinese access to the US stealth helicopter while I was in Islamabad and Abbottabad in the weeks after the Osama Bin Laden raid, all of which turned out to be true. The same went for various accounts of meetings between Chinese intelligence officers and Taliban representatives that I first heard in New Delhi, and were subsequently verified by Chinese, Pakistani, Afghan, and US officials. Sino-Pakistani civil nuclear cooperation consistently proved to be on a grander scale than many people had expected, but I had good sources who kept me accurately informed throughout the evolution of the process from the latest Chashma plants to the new round of reactors in Karachi.

  I was greatly assisted by a number of colleagues in China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, the United States and Europe, many of whom I was dealing with in the course of my day-to-day work at the German Marshall Fund of the United States on issues other than the subject matter of the book. My work at GMF enabled me to travel regularly to all of the countries in question, including extensive side-trips outside the major cities, and to meet people at an array of conferences and seminars in other locations. Some of the most useful material was as likely to come from a brief chat over coffee at a workshop in Paris as it was in a formal sit-down interview in Lahore. As far as possible I tried to visit the locations described, from the Red Mosque and the house in F-8 from which the Chinese “acupuncturists” were kidnapped to the market in Peshawar where the Chinese “academic” was shot, from the length of the Karakoram Highway to Kabul and Kashgar. Since I was travelling independently, safety considerations precluded some trips that would have been useful, particularly in Afghanistan.

  The greater part of the book is based on interviews and exchanges conducted between July 2008 and September 2013. Between July 2008 and November 2011 these were part of my ongoing research, and after that the material was gathered specifically for the purposes of the book. Given the subject matter and the nature of the research process, I have felt obliged to conceal the names of the individuals. While this is standard practice for a lot of publications on contemporary Chinese policy issues, it is evidently undesirable. The community working on these issues directly is very small and I have been grateful that people have been so candid with me. Without this blanket approach of anonymity, it would not, in some cases, be very difficult for well-informed readers to work out who they are. In addition, particularly for the interviews conducted before the book was planned, there was a reasonable presumption on the part of most interviewees that they would not be named, even when the rules of attribution had not been explicitly agreed. Unless stated otherwise, I have also ensured that there are at least two, separate reliable sources for all the interview-based claims, both for the purposes of accuracy and to ensure that none of the material can be traced to a single individual. Wherever possible, I used additional written sources that verified or repeated the claims. The interviews were conducted in English.

  Although the interview process was at the heart of the research, it has naturally relied also on an extensive range of written sources. The early years of the China-Pakistan relationship are actually very well covered, particularly in works by Pakistani authors, such as Anwar Syed’s China and Pakistan: Diplomacy of an Entente Cordiale1 and F.S. A
ijazuddin’s From a Head, Through a Head, To a Head: the Secret Channel between the U.S. and China through Pakistan.2 The relationship is also dealt with extensively in other treatments of the period, such as Mahnaz Ispahani’s Roads and Rivals: The Political Uses of Access in The Borderlands of Asia,3 Altaf Gauhar’s Ayub Khan: Pakistan’s First Military Ruler,4 and Muhammad Mumtaz Khalid’s two-volume History of the Karakoram Highway.5

  For the period after the 1970s, aside from a couple of essay collections—China-Pakistan Strategic Cooperation: Indian Perspectives6 and the very recent Chinese volume, A Model of State-to-State Relations: Retrospects and Prospects of the China-Pakistan Ties since 19517—the material becomes more scattered, and the China-Pakistan relationship is largely addressed in the sidelines of other subjects, such as the China-India relationship or Pakistan’s nuclear history. Some of these treatments, such as John Garver’s seminal studies, are excellent, and provide essential reference points for any examination of the subject.8 There are also individual chapters and articles of considerable value, whether on the overall relationship, such as Riaz Mohammad Khan’s “Pakistan-China Relations: An Overview”9 and Ye Hailin’s “China-Pakistan Relationship: All Weathers, But Maybe Not All-Dimensional”,10 or on important individual themes, such as Ziad Haider’s “Sino-Pakistan Relations and Xinjiang’s Uighurs”11 or Fazal-ur Rehman’s “China-Pakistan Economic Relations”.12 More recently, the challenge has been balancing the analysis of what had previously been a relationship defined by its South Asian framework with the growing influence that terrorism, the take-off of militancy in the region, and developments in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s border regions have started to exert. Some experts, such as Yitzak Shichor, have worked on this angle for a long time, and other researchers such as Raffaello Pantucci have gathered very interesting new material that not only looks at the Xinjiang-Central Asia-Afghanistan-Pakistan nexus but extends it to look at the role of Uighurs in transnational networks as far afield as Syria.13