The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics (23 page)

China was also involved in one of the decisions that would be seen as a turning point in the war. In January 1986, Senator Orrin Hatch visited Beijing, accompanied by a phalanx of US officials from the CIA, the NSC, and the Defense and State Departments who were managing the covert programme in Afghanistan, on a mission to secure Chinese support for the escalation of the
mujahideen
’s campaign.
⁶⁶
A group of administration officials, and their supporters on Capitol Hill, were concerned that the
mujahideen
were losing the war and needed to be armed with more sophisticated weaponry in order to turn the tide. In particular, they wanted to see them provided with Stingers—a portable, shoulder-fired weapon that could launch heat-seeking missiles at Soviet helicopters and transport planes.
⁶⁷
This was a controversial proposal in the United States, where cautious officials were concerned about the Soviet reaction to the introduction of highly visible US weapons, and the possibility that the missiles, if diverted outside Afghanistan, could be used against NATO forces in Europe or even to shoot down passenger aircraft.
⁶⁸
The road to consensus in Washington ran through Islamabad, and the road to Islamabad ran through Beijing. General Zia had not actually asked for the missiles, which was a telling argument used against the hawks:
⁶⁹
Pakistan, after all, was the country most immediately at risk of Soviet retaliation, and Zia himself was afraid that the missiles might be used by terrorists against his own plane.
⁷⁰
China’s support, it was believed, might prove persuasive. Hatch met the head of Chinese intelligence to urge his backing for the increase in the provision of US assistance to the
mujahideen
, particularly a new wave of operations that involved ISI officers accompanying the Afghan rebels on their guerrilla strikes. Hatch then asked if the Chinese would agree to support the Stinger supplies and “if he would communicate his support directly to Pakistani President Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq as part of a coordinated lobbying effort”.
⁷¹
In Hatch’s lively account, “His eyes lit up. His
face hardened. ‘We acquiesce’ he barked out.”
⁷²
It took “months of secret negotiations”
⁷³
with the Chinese and with Zia before everyone was satisfied that the risk was worth taking, but China’s willingness to persuade Pakistan to request the Stingers “cleared the way” for their introduction.
⁷⁴
The ISI’s Afghanistan Bureau Chief described it as the “single most important unresolved matter in defeating the Soviets on the battlefield,”
⁷⁵
and the decision to give the the green light would prove to “tip the balance on the battlefield” in the
mujahideen
’s favour.
⁷⁶

As with the United States, China’s agenda in Afghanistan at the time was purely geopolitical, and once the Soviet Union embarked on the withdrawal of men and matériel in June 1988, leaving only the rusting hulks of tanks and MiG 21s behind, China’s involvement rapidly wound down. Two months later came the infamous plane crash that killed the US Ambassador, Arnold Raphel, and Pakistan’s President, Zia ul Haq. And on 15 February 1989, Boris Gromov, commander of the 40th army, became the last Soviet soldier to walk across the Friendship Bridge and out of Afghanistan.
⁷⁷
While China’s formal diplomatic representation survived the early years of the Najibullah government, it quickly washed its hands of the matter as Afghanistan slid into civil war.

For most of the 1990s, China was officially absent from Kabul. The only remnants of its presence were three Afghan employees who still received payment twice a year from Beijing to tend to the old embassy, which had been the unfortunate victim of stray rockets as a result of its backing onto the presidential palace.
⁷⁸
Even the Chinese dogs there had been shot, one by the
mujahideen
, one by the Taliban.
⁷⁹
Towards the end of the decade, however, Beijing embarked on a process that might have seen its diplomats setting up again at their old address in Wazir Akbar Khan under contentious circumstances. Had it not been for 9/11, there was a good chance that China would have ended up being the first non-Muslim country to recognize Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

Despite the Pakistani army’s deep involvement in backing the movement, Chinese officials had never been enthusiastic about the Taliban’s rise. The ideological and security threat that the fundamentalist militia could pose to Xinjiang and the wider region was clear well before they took power, and when the Taliban made their decisive breakthrough in the civil war, the Islamabad connection was not enough to line Beijing up behind the new regime. While the fall of the northern
city of Mazar-e-Sharif in May 1997 provided sufficient excuse for Pakistan to extend diplomatic recognition to the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” and prod Saudi Arabia and the UAE into doing the same, Beijing demurred.
⁸⁰
There seemed little reason to push back against the near-global consensus that had been arrayed against the Taliban since their first days after sweeping into Kabul in 1996 were marked by the imposition of its peculiarly brutal version of
sharia
law, and the execution and mutiliation of former president Najibullah, who was seized from the UN’s compound.
⁸¹
Following the Al Qaeda bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dares Salaam, as pressure mounted on the Taliban over their provision of sanctuary to the terror group, China happily backed the UN Security Council’s decision to establish a comprehensive set of sanctions against them.
⁸²
It had its own, more direct concerns than Osama Bin Laden. After the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan had become a base for ETIM and other Central Asian militants affiliated to them, such as the IMU, and the training camps that the Uighur group established were in locations—including places in and around Kabul—that left no ambiguity about the fact that they operated with the consent of the country’s new masters.
⁸³

Pakistan had been assuring China that this problem was amenable to negotiation. If Beijing was willing to open channels to the increasingly embattled regime, a deal of sorts might be reached. The Taliban were in desperate need of money and international legitimacy. The United States had curtailed the early diplomatic and commercial flirtations that had once given the Taliban hope that their impeccable anti-Iranian credentials, along with the promise of a pipeline deal, might provide them with a path to respectability in Washington.
⁸⁴
Even Saudi Arabia had pulled out its diplomatic representative from Afghanistan as a result of Mullah Omar’s recalcitrance over Osama Bin Laden.
⁸⁵
For China, the depth of its isolation could be turned into an opportunity. “We urged China and the Taliban to establish formal contacts so that their mutual mistrust can be eliminated,” said one Pakistani diplomat cited by Ahmed Rashid, “the Taliban pose a threat to nobody and want the best of relations with China”.
⁸⁶

The value of a discreetly expanded relationship was already in evidence in the aftermath of the 1998 US cruise missile attacks on terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. Pakistan gave China access to a stray missile that landed on its territory, but Chinese agents also found willing
salesmen on the other side of the border as they sought to recover whatever they could from the Tomahawks.
⁸⁷
These contacts took more open form in early February 1999, when a group of five Chinese diplomats flew into Kabul for a preliminary set of meetings with Taliban officials. Afterwards, China announced the opening of formal trade ties, flights between Kabul and Urumqi, and the provision of food aid.
⁸⁸
At the end of the year, there were rumours that the PLA had agreed to provide low-level military support to the Taliban, via Pakistan, in return for the cut-off of training assistance for Uighurs.
⁸⁹
But China proceeded cautiously. Tang Jiaxuan, the Chinese Foreign Minister, turned down a chance to meet his Taliban counterpart when he was on a visit to Pakistan in 2000.
⁹⁰
Instead a much lower-level diplomat who was accompanying him, Sun Guoxiang, the Deputy Director of the Foreign Ministry’s Asia Department, met the Taliban’s ambassador in Islamabad, Sayyed Mohammad Haqqani.
⁹¹
Haqqani assured Sun that they would not allow anyone to use Afghan territory against Beijing: “Some foreign enemies of the people of Afghanistan and vested interests are bent upon creating misunderstanding and differences between the two friendly countries by leveling false and baseless allegations.”
⁹²
But the decisive assurances that Beijing sought could only come from the very top: Mullah Omar himself.

The preparations for a meeting with the Taliban’s reclusive leader were made in Islamabad. Following the first round of UN sanctions, the Taliban’s embassy there had become their principal diplomatic outlet to the world. The Chinese ambassador to Pakistan, Lu Shulin, an Urdu speaker who had studied at Karachi University in the 1960s, conveyed an official request for a meeting through his Afghan counterpart, Abdul Salam Zaeef. In his autobiography, Zaeef would describe the Chinese ambassador as “the only one to maintain a good relationship with the embassy and with [Taliban-run] Afghanistan”.
⁹³
Additional groundwork was laid in an “unofficial” visit to Kandahar in November 2000 by a delegation from the think-tank attached to China’s ministry of state security, the Chinese Institute of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR).
⁹⁴
The following month, the intelligence agents and academics were followed by Lu Shulin himself, who visited Afghanistan as part of a three-man team. In Kabul, he met a powerful group of Taliban leaders, including the Vice-president of the Council of Ministers, Mullah Muhammad Hassan Akhund, who oversaw the defence, intelligence and
security apparatus, and the Interior Minister, Mullah Abdul Razzaq Akhundzada.
⁹⁵
The two men would later become members of the Quetta Shura, the Taliban’s ruling body in exile. After his visit to Kabul, Lu took an Ariana flight down to Kandahar, the birthplace of the movement and the country’s
de facto
capital, where he became the first senior representative of a non-Muslim country to meet the Taliban’s amir, and one of only a tiny handful of non-Muslims that Omar ever dealt with. This fact became vividly clear to the Chinese diplomats when they presented him with a gift, in the shape of a small camel figurine, to which he reacted as if they had handed him “a piece of red hot coal”, believing the representation of a living being to be idolatrous.
⁹⁶

In their discussions, Lu raised China’s concerns about “rumours that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was allegedly assisting the Muslims in Xinjiang”.
⁹⁷
Mullah Omar assured the Chinese ambassador that “Afghanistan never had any interest or wish to interfere in China’s domestic issues and affairs, nor would Afghanistan allow any group to use its territory to conduct any such operations or support one to that end.”
⁹⁸
Both sides emerged from the meeting only partially satisfied. The Taliban’s leadership had hoped that China might be helpful in fending off a new set of UN sanctions, which included the imposition of an arms embargo, travel bans, a prohibition of flights from Afghanistan, and the mandatory closure of the Taliban’s overseas offices. Beijing did not veto the resolution, but, instead of supporting it, as it had the unanimously approved sanctions of 1999, made a point of abstaining, expressing concern “that the Afghan people would suffer from the measures proposed in the resolution”.
⁹⁹
Even more importantly, China gave the go-ahead for a set of commercial interactions that would help mitigate the sanctions’ impact. Huawei and ZTE were believed to have agreed to provide a limited phone service in Afghanistan, ZTE signing a contract to install 5,000 phone lines in Kabul, and Huawei to install 12,000 lines in Kandahar.
¹⁰⁰
Chinese companies, such as Dongfeng Agricultural Machinery Company, began repairs to Afghanistan’s power grid, fixing dams in Kandahar, Helmand and Nangarhar. For their part, the Taliban “ordered the East Turkistan group to cease their attacks against China”.
¹⁰¹
While in practice this only seemed to result in their having to join IMU camps instead of operating their own independent camps, the distinction was not without consequence—the Uighurs were not expelled from Afghanistan, but they were effectively subsumed into
the activities of the Central Asian groups rather than being given the freedom to pursue a China-centric agenda.
¹⁰²

The prize that the Taliban and their Pakistani sponsors really craved from Beijing was diplomatic recognition, and, despite Afghanistan’s increasingly pariah-like status, the possibility of granting it was at least under consideration. China’s formal stance was that it would not make a decision until the UN’s position had been determined, but its growing diplomatic and economic engagement in Afghanistan was taking things in a clear direction. Relations experienced a setback, however, with the destruction of the large 8th century Buddha statues in Bamiyan. China, along with Japan and Sri Lanka, was later described by Taliban officials as being one of the most active states in lobbying against the spectacular act of cultural vandalism once the plans were made public.
¹⁰³
When a Taliban commercial delegation arrived in China a couple of months after the dynamiting of the statues, they found that all of their official meetings with the Chinese government had been refused.
¹⁰⁴
Although the threads between the two sides were picked up again, many of the plans were destined never to come to fruition. A Chinese delegation visited Kabul later that year to ink an MOU spelling out plans to upgrade economic and technical cooperation, which was signed by Mullah Mohammad Issa Akhund, the Taliban’s Minister of Mines and Industries. The announcement of the deal came on 11 September 2001.
¹⁰⁵