The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics (20 page)

Like many other joint Sino-Pakistani projects, the KKH would have been killed off quickly if its economic value had been the only thing it had going for it: the highway was conceived as a political and territorial project, not as the most logical trade route between the two sides. Its direct military utility is questionable, given that it would be easy to interdict in the event of war, and no logistical planner could expect to count on a reliably landslide-free supply route. But it “altered the balance of geographical politics on the subcontinent”, expanding the reach of the Pakistani government into previously inaccessible frontier regions, and consolidating Sino-Pakistani control over territory that India claims as its own.
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As the roadbuilding initiative was launched, Ayub Khan
“was pleased to remark that in order of priority the first urgency was strategic and one of the immediate significance”. The “economic and commercial importance of the highway” was only “the second objective” for Pakistan.
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The same was true for China. The principal construction phase for the road closely paralleled the Cultural Revolution, a period that was distinguished by very little normal economic planning. The largest centrally directed Chinese economic project at the time was the vast “Third Front” programme to develop an industrial base in the west of the country that could act as a strategic reserve in the event of war with the United States or the Soviet Union.
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The route, especially the development of the border-crossing at Khunjerab rather than the more obvious Mintaka Pass, was carefully devised to keep it further from the Soviet border.
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China’s sense of encirclement, vulnerability and isolation was acute, and Pakistan in the mid-1960s was one of the few countries that mitigated it. The Sino-Pakistani air agreement of 1963, China’s first with a non-Communist country, breached the Western ban on commercial air services to China, and ensured that it was no longer “air-locked”.
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The Karakoram Highway itself provided a “‘welcome out’ sign at their backdoor”.
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Military and political considerations underpin many of the other principal joint economic projects too. China’s investments in Pakistan’s civil nuclear power sector, addressed in more detail in the second chapter and in the epilogue, do have commercial utility—they give China’s nuclear industry the opportunity to showcase power plants outside its home market. But they have also been inextricably bound up with the long-standing programme of Sino-Pakistani nuclear weapons cooperation and, in more recent years, the response by Islamabad and Beijing to the US-India nuclear deal. It is even more obvious in the defence sector, the one area of commercial relations that can genuinely be said to be booming. Exports to Pakistan, which comprise 55% of Chinese arms sales, propelled China to become the world’s fifth largest arms exporter in 2012.
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The major defence-industrial relationships between China and Pakistan are the successors of the procurement agreements of the 1960s and 1970s, when China swung in to assist Pakistan during and after its wars with India. Companies such as the China Precision Machinery Import-Export Corporation, the Chinese missile exporter, and the principal Chinese defence-production companies, Poly Technologies and
Norinco, have longstanding relationships with Pakistan dating back to their days as arms of the Chinese state. When Norinco and Heavy Industries Taxila (HIT) announced in 2012 their plans to jointly sell the tanks and other security vehicles they produce together to new markets, it was the culmination of decades of cooperation.
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Norinco is the successor of China’s fifth ministry of machine building, which oversaw tank, artillery and small arms production.
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HIT is the huge military-industrial complex in the Punjab that was originally established with Beijing’s assistance to maintain and rebuild the Pakistani army’s fleet of Chinese T59 tanks after the 1965 war.
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There is now a lengthening list of such joint ventures, including the JF-17 fighter aircraft, developed for Pakistan’s air force by China’s Chengdu Aircraft Industrial Corporation and Pakistan Aeronautical Complex;
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and the F-22P frigates
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and the PNS Azmat fast attack vehicles, built by Karachi Shipyard and Engineering Works, the China Shipbuilding and Trading Company and other Chinese firms.
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The value of defence-industrial ties for Pakistan goes well beyond their economic or military value. Not only do they grease the wheels of the China-Pakistan relationship, they ensure buy-in from some of China’s highest-ranking party and military families, who have controlled companies like Poly Industries since their inception.
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While nuclear plants and armaments production are in secure locations, other Chinese companies operating in Pakistan are less fortunate. Telecoms, power, and mining have promised some of the most significant new infusions of Chinese manpower and resources, but have faced some of the most acute security risks. Huawei, the world’s largest telecoms equipment company, has become Pakistan’s dominant telecoms infrastructure operator, and ZTE, Huawei’s state-owned counterpart, spent several years as its largest telecoms vendor. China Mobile, the mammoth Chinese mobile telecoms company, made Pakistan the destination for its first overseas acquisition, purchasing Paktel, the fifth largest Pakistani mobile operator, for $284 million in January 2007.
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“If we cannot succeed in Pakistan, we’d better not go anywhere else,” the company’s Chairman Wang Jianzhou declared after the acquisition.
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The hydropower sector in Pakistan features a roll-call of Chinese mega-firms working on a range of current or prospective projects: Sinohydro,
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China Three Gorges Corporation,
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and Gezhouba Group.
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And the mining sector has seen Chinese companies such as China Metallurgical Group Corporation
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and China Kingho Group drawn in by the
opportunities to tap natural resources in Balochistan and Sindh.
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Some of the companies and projects have struggled—China Mobile did poorly with its revenue and customer base, its new brand “Zong” ending up in last place among the operators in Pakistan;
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the hydro projects have hit an assortment of financing hurdles.
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But for a list of companies that reads like a “Who’s Who” of the major Chinese investors in the developing world, the challenges of unfamiliar markets, corruption, and politicized deal-making are par for the course. Since 2004, though, they had to navigate security threats of a novel sort.

The violence that convulsed Gwadar port was at one level predictable. When it came to security, Balochistan was understood to be a special case—an on-off insurgency had been running there virtually throughout Pakistan’s history, and accusations of external involvement ran back for decades.
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Soviet help to Baloch agitation was raised by the Chinese as a subject of concern as long ago as the 1970s, and the involvement of the Americans, the British, and (especially) the Indians in backing the Baloch nationalists has been a source of finger-pointing for many years.
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In that sense, China knew what it was signing up for when it agreed to develop a port in the restive province. In the rest of the country, however, it believed that—as Pakistan’s close friend—it was safe from the sort of political targeting that Gwadar attracted. Events in South Waziristan would therefore come as something of a shock.

The Gomal Zam dam project, about 13km west of Tank, the winter headquarters of the FATA agency, had a long prehistory: a feasibility report on the dam’s construction was first commissioned by the British Royal Corps of Engineers in 1898.
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An abortive effort to build the dam was finally made in 1963 but it was not until August 2001, when a Chinese consortium was brought in to lead the construction, that it looked as if it would finally be realized.
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The South Waziristan region had a fearsome reputation but the project provided demonstrable local economic benefits, including irrigation and electricity, and it was hoped that the dam-building could proceed in peace. But by the time construction was underway, the tribal agency had become the principal location for foreign fighters fleeing Afghanistan. As a result, there was growing US pressure on the Pakistani government to launch military action against the Al Qaeda-linked militants who had set themselves up there.
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In January 2004, the army launched its first operation in South Waziristan. In October that year, two Chinese engineers working for
Sino Hydro went missing. The two men, Wang Teng and Wang Ende, had been heading to work at the dam early in the morning when they were seized, their abandoned vehicle being found nearby.
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The initial hope for the Pakistanis and the Chinese was that the kidnappers were simply bandits seeking ransom, which was not uncommon in the area and could have been dealt with quickly and quietly. There were also rumours that some of the kidnappers were foreigners—specifically Uzbeks, which would have linked them to Uighur terrorist groups.
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But the identity of the real protagonists was far more troubling: Pakistanis with a political agenda.

The operation had been ordered by a one-legged militant commander who had once been held at Guantánamo Bay, Abdullah Mehsud, who was a member of the region’s largest tribe. In an interview with a Pakistani journalist, he argued his case: “We have no enmity with the Chinese people, and I am sad that we had to kidnap the Chinese engineers,” he said. “But desperate people do desperate things and the only way we thought we could compel the Pakistan government to stop its military operations in South Waziristan was to kidnap engineers belonging to Pakistan’s best friend, China.”
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The national and local reaction was swift. General Musharraf publicly stated that he would personally shoot Abdullah Mehsud dead if he had the chance.
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Abdullah Mehsud was summoned before local
jirga
s led by Mehsud elders in an attempt to persuade him to release the hostages.
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The government sent four of his cousins—including his brother-in-law—to engage in negotiations. The Pakistani government had been so concerned about the engineers’ safety that it was even willing to consider his immediate demand to give the kidnappers and their hostages safe passage to nearby Spinkai Raghzai, in territory under the control of Mehsud and his men. Initially it seemed as if there might be an amicable resolution. Abdullah Mehsud allowed messages in Chinese to be passed to the Chinese embassy and to Sino Hydro. But ultimately the army decided to move. Pakistani commandos dressed as members of local tribes launched an attack on the mud hut in Chagmalai where the kidnappers and their hostages were holed up. The two kidnapped men had been wired with explosives, and Wang Teng, the younger of the two engineers, who also spoke some English, had urged the Pakistani government not to conduct a military operation given the danger it would place them in. His young wife was waiting for him at the Sino Hydro office in Dera Esmail Khan. The
kidnappers were killed in the raid, but so was Wang, who was hit by bullets as he tried to duck behind one of Mehsud’s men.
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The tragic incident derailed the dam project. The Chinese companies pulled out for three years, only resuming in 2007 when the Frontier Works Organisation had taken charge and a far more robust level of security protection was provided.
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At the time there was reason to hope that the kidnapping might be a one-off. Even Haji Mohammad Omar, who was one of the principal leaders of the Pakistani militants operating in FATA, denounced the whole operation: “Abdullah Mahsud committed a blunder. He shouldn’t have kidnapped the Chinese engineers. And after the botched kidnapping attempt, he should have agreed to the government’s offer of safe passage for the five kidnappers in return for the release of the two Chinese hostages. I am still unable to understand why he so carelessly sacrificed five young and loyal militants who organised the kidnapping and obeyed his every order,” said Omar.
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The Chinese were not, for the most part, seen as a legitimate target, and even Abdullah Mehsud had been apologetic about his political tactics. The Pakistani government’s relationship with the militants was not yet at breaking point. And from China’s perspective, Pakistan—and General Musharraf—had acted quickly and forcefully. But in fact, the kidnapping was only the start.

The Lal Masjid siege in 2007, detailed in the prologue, knocked out all grounds for believing that the Gomal Zam kidnappings might be an aberration. The Pakistani government’s relationship with the Mehsud tribe, and others that went on to form a mainstay of the Pakistani Taliban, moved from a period of half-hearted military forays, negotiations, and peace deals into outright warfare. And the Chinese were turned into legitimate targets for groups that had previously left them alone. In the aftermath of the revenge killings of three Chinese engineers in Peshawar that followed Lal Masjid, it was clear that there had to be a dramatic shift in the level of protection provided.
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As a result, Pakistan and China put in place an extensive battery of security and emergency response mechanisms. A joint liaison committee for the safety of Chinese workers was established, consisting of officials from the National Crisis Management Cell and the Chinese embassy.
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A 24-hour hotline connected the Chinese diplomats with the interior ministry and all Pakistani provinces, alongside an early warning system for Chinese associations, company heads, and student groups. There was a scramble to register
everyone. Estimates of the total number of Chinese nationals in Pakistan have run between 10,000 and 13,000, among whom a 2009 embassy estimate suggested 5,000 were labourers, 3,500 engineers and 1,000 business people.
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Thousands of additional Pakistani security personnel were deployed to protect Chinese projects. Workers in some of the most dangerous locations travelled in armed convoys or armoured personnel carriers, or even commuted to work by helicopter. In supposedly safe locations, Chinese businesspeople took additional precautions, with drivers being assigned at short notice, and information about their destinations and routes withheld until the start of the journey.
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The Chinese embassy itself responded to the heightened security risk by buying in a 20-day stockpile of food, water and diesel oil, and was reported to have started a vegetable plot “as a reserve food source”.
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Chinese officials now described security concerns in Pakistan as their “top priority”.
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Musharraf’s successor would find out that they weren’t bluffing.