The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics

ANDREW SMALL

Asia’s New Geopolitics

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With offices in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by
Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Copyright © Andrew Small, 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title Small, Andrew
The China-Pakistan Axis
Asia’s New Geopolitics
ISBN 978-0-19-021075-5
eISBN 978-0-19-025757-6

Abbreviations

Prologue: In the Shadow of the Red Mosque

Introduction

1. A Friendship Forged by War

2. Nuclear Fusion

3. Re-hyphenating India

4.
The
Chinese War on Terror

5.
The
Trade Across the Roof of the World

6. Tea with the Taliban

7. Lord, Make them Leave—But Not Yet

Epilogue: The Dragon Meets the Lion

Note on Sourcing

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

“The Pakistanis love China for what it can do for them, while the Chinese love Pakistanis despite what they do to themselves.”
^₂

In the early hours of Sunday, June 24 2007, vigilante groups from Lal Masjid, the Red Mosque, raided a Chinese massage parlour and acupuncture clinic in sector F-8, one of Islamabad’s wealthiest neighbourhoods.
³
Overpowering three Pakistani guards, the militants, including ten burqa-clad women armed with batons, entered the house and demanded that the workers there accompany them. When the seven Chinese staff and two Pakistani clients refused, they were beaten and forcibly abducted. The “vice and virtue” squad took their victims to the Jamia Hafsa madrassa, a short distance from the clinic, where a spokesman announced to local press that “this place was used as a brothel house and despite our warnings the administration failed to take any action, so we decided to take action on our own.”
⁴

For the Lal Masjid radicals it was a serious tactical error. The same band of militants had been involved in a similar episode a few months earlier, when they rounded off their assault on another brothel by kidnapping four policemen. But the involvement of Chinese citizens made the June 24 incident far graver a matter. The treatment of China’s overseas nationals had become a subject of acute sensitivity for Beijing. In the eyes of the more assertive sections of the Chinese public it was a test
of the Communist Party’s backbone, as the mocking packages of calcium pills they sent to the foreign ministry attested.
⁵
The imprisonment of seven Chinese workers within spitting distance of the principal government institutions of a country that was supposed to be China’s closest ally was a matter of serious embarrassment. China’s president, Hu Jintao, would receive regular briefings from his diplomats in Pakistan as the drama of the next seventeen hours unfolded.
⁶

The kidnappings set in motion a fateful chain of events that resulted, within weeks, in a bloody denouement at the mosque, and the irrevocable altering of the relationship between Pakistan’s military and its militants. And while the showdown between the army and the extremist bastion in the nation’s capital had been looming for some time, few would have anticipated the country that provided the final trigger for the confrontation. Not the United States, whose efforts to push Islamabad to crack down on domestic militancy were so often outmanoeuvred, but Pakistan’s all-weather friend whose requests could not be ignored: China.

For all the challenges that Pakistan faced, early in 2007 things seemed to be looking up. Annual growth ran at nearly 7 per cent.
⁷
The inflow of foreign investment had doubled in each of the last three years,
⁸
and the Karachi Stock Exchange was one of the world’s leading performers.
⁹
Three years of secret talks with India had brought the two sides tantalisingly close to a deal over Kashmir.
¹⁰
The strategic setback Pakistan faced in Afghanistan after 9/11, when it lost the government it had installed to a US invasion that it felt compelled to support, was being reversed by a resurgent Taliban. “Our boys”, as they were once openly described by Pakistan’s interior minister, had re-taken control over swathes of the south and east of Afghanistan.
¹¹
Even better: despite the insurgency being led, armed and financed from Pakistan, the relationship with the United States remained strong. Pervez Musharraf, the president and chief of army staff, had recently completed a visit-cum-book-tour of the United States with an itinerary that would make any American politician envious.
¹²
His efforts to position Pakistan as a crucial ally in the war against global terrorism continued to bear fruit, not least in the flow of billions of dollars of military aid and vital arms transfers.

China had its own part to play in this upbeat picture. The new port at Gwadar—which Chinese companies had built and mostly paid for—had just been inaugurated, promising “the next Dubai” on the Makran
coast and an energy transshipment corridor running from the Arabian Sea through to China’s booming cities.
¹³
Coupled with plans to expand the Karakoram Highway, which spans the high mountain passes in North-East Pakistan and North-West China, and a host of new telecommunications and mining investments, there was now hope that Pakistan’s prospects might be tied to China’s extraordinary economic expansion. Beijing was even there to cushion the blow of the US-India civil nuclear agreement, announced in 2005. Not only was there a prospect of China giving Pakistan a matching deal—the expansion of the Chashma nuclear power plants—but the US-India move seemed to mark the end of any temptation for Beijing to take a more balanced approach in its relations with its two South Asian neighbours. Residual Pakistani anxieties about China being lured away by India’s economic boom were instead superseded by the prospect of consolidating a new axis with the emerging superpower.

But a time-bomb was ticking in the heart of Pakistan’s capital. Lal Masjid and the Jamia Hafsa madrassa are located only a few blocks from the Presidential Palace, and even closer to the headquarters of Pakistan’s military intelligence service, the ISI. The first mosque to be built when Islamabad was established as the seat of government in Karachi’s place, it had long been frequented by the city’s senior generals and politicians.
¹⁴
Yet in the years leading up to 2007, it became the epicentre of Pakistan’s fraught relationship with the extremist forces that its army both sympathised with and feared, part directed and part struggled to control. Lal Masjid’s ties with militants were longstanding, but in the past those links had been largely state-supported. In the 1980s, the mosque acted as an important recruiting post for mujahideen in the anti-Soviet campaign, and welcomed fighters in transit to Afghanistan and Kashmir alike.
¹⁵
Its relationship with the Taliban and Al Qaeda burgeoned in the decade that followed. The mosque’s founder, Muhammad Abdullah Ghazi, met and was professedly inspired by Osama Bin Laden during a trip to Kandahar in 1998 to “pay homage” to the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar. Ghazi was accompanied by his son, Abdul Rashid, who would run the mosque with his elder brother, Abdul Aziz, following their father’s murder barely months later. As journalist Zahid Hussain recounts,