Transcript Slide 1

Clingendael
20 October 2008
THE CHINA-PAKISTAN
AXIS
A “Huntingtonian” InterCivilizational Brotherhood ?
Willem van Kemenade
E-mail: kemenade@xs4all
www.willemvk.org
The US, China and Pakistan
• The US built a close relationship with Pakistan President
Pervez Musharraf on the basis of his hard line against
terrorism. Shared recognition of a security threat bound
the two states together, much as it did during the early
Cold War. But Pakistani voters questioned that priority,
and the outcome of February parliamentary elections
revealed the fragility of the current US-Pakistan alliance
constructed on security interests.
• In contrast, China’s alliance with Pakistan is based on
permanent strategic interests and immutable issues of
geography, including China’s desire for access to the
Indian Ocean. Regardless of a world’s changing security
paradigm, the pair’s trade and security interests will
continue to coincide. Thus, Pakistan’s alliance with
China is more enduring than the one with the US.
Musharraf:
Gambling Opportunist
• Musharraf was swept aside in a landslide
not by the Islamists, but by the modernist secular parties,
the late Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party and
Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League.
• The winners wanted Musharraf out, and the Bush
administration tinkered with the result of this election by
pondering ways to keep Musharraf in a modified role.
• Pakistan’s other great power ally, China, has played its
cards more prudently. On the basis of its sacrosanct
principle of non-interference in other countries’ internal
affairs – except when Chinese are killed or kidnapped –
Beijing kept an open mind, and its think tanks advocated
“no commitment” to Musharraf and pragmatism,
China’s Main Foreign Policy Principle:
Non-Interference, but not this time
• The Chinese became involved in Pakistan’s descent into
chaos last year. After the abduction and killing of
Chinese technicians and businessmen on several
occasions, China demanded, in unusually forceful
language, better protection for its citizens against
terrorism.
• The most violent event in Pakistan during 2007 was the
July storming of the Lal Masjid Mosque in Islamabad, at
Musharraf’s orders, to end the occupation by religious
militants, most of them seminarians.
• Nine days earlier, in a self-styled anti-vice campaign,
these militants had kidnapped the Chinese boss and six
Chinese women from a massage parlor.
The Lal Masjid
Massacre
• As 15,000 army troops were preparing to choke off the
militants’ supply of food, water and electricity, tension
further escalated after three Chinese were executed
near Peshawar in Pakistan’s Northwest. An enraged
Musharraf abandoned his slow strangulation strategy
and ordered an all-out assault. The BBC reported 173
deaths, but Pakistani witnesses reported that more than
1.000 people were killed.
• Some Pakistani analysts blamed Musharraf’s
excessiveness, at least in part, on Chinese pressure.
• A prominent Chinese academician argued that the
“destiny of one person” should not decide the political
system in Pakistan, implying that the remedy lies in
political institutionalization.
China moved into Pakistan after
American “Betrayal”
• The China-Pakistan alliance was conceived in 1962 when
Pakistan felt betrayed by the US, after the latter rushed to
the aid of India following its defeat in the border war with
China. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, foreign minister under President
Ayub Khan since 1963, became the architect of the almost
exclusive strategic reorientation of Pakistan towards China.
• China became Pakistan’s arms supplier with no strings
attached, and Pakistan became China’s backdoor to the
Indian Ocean and the Middle East and its comrade-in-arms
for the containment of India.
• Pakistan considered American inaction during the 1965
Kashmir War a second betrayal. The US-Pakistan alliance
became defunct and was only briefly revived by an
American show of naval force to reassure Pakistan during
India’s liberation of Bangladesh in 1971.
China helped Pakistan
to build the “Bomb”
• China remained the cornerstone of Pakistan’s foreign
policy because it was the only country that fully identified
with its anti-India goals. In 1965 Bhutto requested China
for the first time to help Pakistan develop the bomb, but
Beijing turned him down. After the amputation of EastPakistan and India’s nuclear tests in 1974, China
changed its position and began assisting Pakistan with
the enrichment of weapons-grade uranium and transfer
of missile technology, which lasted through the 1990s.
• During the 1980s, training of Uygurs from Xinjiang by the
Pakistani military to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan
became an irritant in Sino-Pakistani relations. When the
Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s
with the full backing of Pakistan’s military, China became
apprehensive about Pakistan turning into a catalyst for
an Islamic revival in its troubled Western region.
9/11
• After the 9/11 attacks on the US, China became aware
that Pakistan was more part of the problem on the two
most contentious issues – terrorism and proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction – than of the solution.
“Strategic partnership” with Pakistan on the old basis
– containment of India – had become untenable.
• Pakistan’s I.S.I. had facilitated the “Talibanization” of
parts of the country and thus paved the way for Al
Qaeda.
• China’s access to the Indian Ocean, alternative energysupply routes from the China-invested port of Gwadar on
the Persian Gulf and economic development of China’s
Far West provided a new rationale for a revamped
strategic relationship.
Gwadar, Pakistan
New focal point for strategic rivalry
between the US, China and India
• China and the US have gotten into a major contest for the Gwadar
port in Pakistan.
• China partly financed Gwadar’s construction in response to the
American presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to monitor US
activity in the Middle East, Indian naval movements in the Arabian
Sea, and future Indo-US maritime cooperation in the Indian Ocean.
• China has so far paid $ 200 m of the $ 1.16 bn cost of Gwadar.
• Gwadar is on Pakistan's Arabian Sea coast, 72 km from Iran. It is
near the mouth of the Persian Gulf and 400 km from the Strait of
Hormuz, through which 40 % of the world’s oil passes.
• China has put together a “string of pearls” from the Gulf to SouthChina. Gwadar is the westernmost pearl which should also help
transform the economy of its landlocked Xinjiang Region.
Pakistan: China’s
Backdoor to the
Indian Ocean
• 1969: China started construction
of the Karakoram Highway, the
first phase of “The Long March
South to the Indian Ocean.”
• During President Musharraf’s visit to China in February
2006, Pakistan requested that China help with its
upgrading and Musharraf said, “This road, when
upgraded, will provide the shortest route to the sea for
products manufactured in China.
• The same road can serve to provide an overland route
for trade between China and India, thus linking two of the
largest markets in Asia.” In November 2006 the two
countries signed a free trade agreement aiming to
expand trade to $8 billion in 2008.
China strongly committed to vital
longterm Friendship with Pakistan
• Despite its disenchantment with the current state of
Pakistan and improving relations with India, China is
strongly committed to its vital long-term friendship with
Pakistan. Apart from economics, the ethnic and religious
peace of its far western region depends on close
cooperation with its southwestern neighbor. Hu
Shisheng, a Chinese specialist in South Asian politics at
the China Institute for Contemporary International
Relations in Beijing, sums it up:
– “We will contribute to its stabilization. A stable Pakistan is essential for
building a stable Xinjiang. A disintegrated or dismantled Pakistan will be
a disaster for us. We know that during the American campaigns in
Afghanistan and operations in Pakistan, Uygurs were caught. There are
huge tribal areas there which have run themselves for centuries.
Without close cooperation with Pakistan, how can China ensure stability
there?”