The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics (2 page)

At the end of the meeting… he picked up bin Laden’s glass of water and drank from it. An amused bin Laden asked him the reason for his action, to which Abdul Rashid replied, “I drank from your glass so that Allah would make me a warrior like you”.
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Tensions between Lal Masjid and the Pakistani government began after the decision by General Musharraf, Pakistan’s army chief and president, to provide backing to the US invasion of Afghanistan, which the two brothers vocally denounced. In 2004, the delicate relationship between the two sides broke down when Abdul Rashid Ghazi issued a fatwa against the Pakistani army’s operations in Waziristan, the hotbed of militancy in the tribal areas where Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters had fled after the invasion, declaring that “those killed in the battle against Pakistani forces are martyrs”.
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Seventy percent of the students at Lal Masjid and its affiliated seminaries, many of them hardened militants, were from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and North-West Frontier Province, the Pashtun-dominated territory that sits between Islamabad and the tribal regions.
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Ghazi maintained close contact with the leaders of the insurgency. Soon afterwards, he was charged with a plot to blow up the president’s house, the parliament building, and the army headquarters, before being bailed out by the federal minister for religious affairs, Ejaz ul Haq, a patron of the mosque and the son of the former army chief and Pakistani president, General Zia.
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The deal that got Ghazi off the hook, in which he promised not to engage in anti-state activities, didn’t hold for long.
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By 2007, the mosque had become a near-insurrectionary enclave—a heavily armed, pro-Taliban HQ with its own sharia courts and “vice and virtue” groups that attacked music and DVD shops around the capital.
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Yet it was to prove an even greater threat to the authority of the Pakistani state after the convulsive end of the Ghazis’ reign.

The man on the spot as the kidnapping drama in Islamabad escalated was Luo Zhaohui, a young, self-confident ambassador on the rise, and a rarity in the Chinese foreign ministry both for his South Asia expertise and his towering height. He had taken up the post only recently, alongside his wife Jiang Yili, a fellow diplomat and scholar who had translated Benazir Bhutto’s memoir into Chinese.
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By the cautious standards of Chinese officials, he would play an unusually active role in the events that followed. Instead of leaving the task to the Pakistani government alone, Luo sought to use the influence of leading political figures that he knew had a direct channel to Abdul Rashid Ghazi. After speaking with Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Shaukat Aziz, he met with Maulana Fazlur Rahman, the Opposition Leader, and former Prime Minister Shujaat
Hussain, the head of Musharraf ’s PML (Q) party, to seek their support for securing the freedom of the hostages. Rahman had long been the go-to guy for any dealings with this particular fringe of Pakistani political life but it was the PML chief—himself supposedly a user of the “clinic”—who was acting as chief government negotiator with the mosque’s leadership, and fixed up the telephone call between Ghazi and the ambassador from his home.
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Abdul Rashid Ghazi was seen as a savvy operator, adept in dealing with the media and telling different political audiences what they wanted to hear. His handling of the Chinese was no different. He “assured [Luo] that they would be released soon” and allowed the ambassador to speak to the hostages.
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Despite these promises, there were to be five hours of negotiation with senior police and administration officials, which Musharraf, who was then in Lahore, and Aziz monitored “minute by minute”.
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Deputy Commissioner Chaudhry Muhammad Ali and Senior Superintendent of Police Zafar Iqbal were reported to have “begged” for the release of the hostages, and given assurances about stopping mixed-sex massage parlours in future, before Ghazi finally relented.
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“We released them in view of Pakistan-China friendship” he announced to a crowded press conference. “After receiving a number of complaints regarding ‘sex business’, our students and people of the area took an action that should have been taken by the government”.
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“We greatly respect Pakistan-China friendship but it doesn’t mean that foreign women can come here and indulge in such vulgar activities. Even housewives used to tell us by phone that the centre charges Rs 1,000 for massage while by paying Rs 500, something else was also available”, he said.
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The Chinese women were released in burqas.
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The “near diplomatic disaster”with China still had further to run.
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The kidnapping took place on the eve of high-level talks in Beijing with the Pakistani interior minister, as part of the preparation for the 2008 Olympics. Those talks would now be a great deal more uncomfortable. After giving his counterpart “an earful” in private,
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Zhou Yongkang, China’s public security minister, publicly declared on June 27 that “we hope Pakistan will look into the terrorist attacks aiming at Chinese people and organisations as soon as possible and severely punish the criminals”.
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A bracing phone call from Hu Jintao to President Musharraf followed similar lines, and was reinforced by senior PLA officials.
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Word leaked out that in the course of its bilateral talks, China was
attributing the instigation of the kidnappings to the influence of militants from China’s Uighur minority at Lal Masjid.
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Islamabad was not just being accused of being negligent in guaranteeing the security of Chinese citizens on Pakistan’s soil but of tolerating terrorist threats to China itself.

Accounts of the crucial decision-making process in the Pakistani government vary. According to some, it was Chinese pressure itself that ultimately brought the siege about. Others suggest that in the debates over how to respond, China’s concerns were used as a pretext by Musharraf and those around him who had long wanted to move against Lal Masjid anyway but had faced resistance to their previous demands for raids on the mosque.
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Either way, in Musharraf ’s November speech justifying the action, China was at the forefront: “The Chinese, who are such great friends of ours—they took the Chinese hostage and tortured them. Because of this, I was personally embarrassed. I had to go apologize to the Chinese leaders, ‘I am ashamed that you are such great friends and this happened to you’”.
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On July 3, Pakistani security forces surrounded the Lal Masjid complex and the siege began. Seven days later, following several deadlines, hundreds of surrenders, and Abdul Aziz’s attempt to flee the mosque disguised as a woman, they launched their final, decisive assault. At 4am on July 10, commandos from the Pakistani Army’s Special Services Group stormed the compound. Islamabad shook to the sound of explosions as the battle began, the first time the Pakistani capital had ever experienced fighting on such a scale. The mosque and women’s religious school in the centre of the city was by now a fortified enclave, protected by heavily-armed militants, and it took over twenty hours for the Pakistani forces to battle their way through the basements, bunkers and tunnels.
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By the time the commando raid, Operation Silence, was over at least 103 people were dead. Some accounts place the numbers closer to several hundred.
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Among the dead were many of the baton-wielding, burqa-clad female shock troops who had been dispensing vigilante justice around Islamabad. Of the 15 non-Afghan foreigners killed, 12 were Uighurs.
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And among the Pakistanis was Abdul Rashid Ghazi himself, who died during the crossfire in the last standoff in the Jamia Hafsa madrassa’s basement, shortly after giving his last telephone interview to Pakistan’s Geo TV.

China did not have to wait long for the repercussions. Even as the siege was underway, an act of apparent retaliation saw three Chinese
engineers at an auto-rickshaw factory in Peshawar murdered by gunmen shouting religious slogans.
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Beijing was just getting used to being targeted by Baloch militants for its involvement in the Gwadar port development, but this was something altogether new. Belatedly, they moved to issue a public denial of any involvement, stating that “China did not push Pakistan for operations against the Red Mosque… It is the consistent policy of China not to meddle in the domestic affairs of other countries”.
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Few were convinced. More than a year later, following another kidnapping of Chinese workers, a Taliban spokesman was still citing “Chinese pressure to launch Operation Silence” at Lal Masjid as part of the rationale for seizing the engineers.
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Luo Zhaohui himself would end up on a Taliban hit list. “The militants were offended”, said one senior Peshawari journalist, “the feeling among them was that it would not have happened if the Chinese had not demanded action”.
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Pakistan was on its way to becoming the single most dangerous overseas location for Chinese workers.

Yet it was the consequences for Pakistan itself that were even more troubling for Beijing. The siege was a watershed moment for the country, the point after which the Pakistani government’s delicate dance with the new wave of militants turned into open warfare. The assault on the mosque was used as a rallying cry by extremists, proof that the Pakistani military had betrayed them. A wave of violence and bombings convulsed Pakistan’s major cities. Before July 2007 there had been only 42 suicide attacks in Pakistan. There were more than 47 in the remaining months of 2007 alone,
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and in the year after the siege, 1,188 people were killed and 3,209 wounded.
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Osama Bin Laden issued his first statement urging attacks on the Pakistani government.
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Insurgents that had been reluctant to turn their focus away from Afghanistan were now snapping away at the hand that once fed them. The array of militant groups in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) annulled their peace agreement with the Pakistani government and consolidated themselves into a new organisation—the Tehrik-i-Taliban-Pakistan. In less than two years, they would control territory within 60 miles of Islamabad.
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One of the Pakistani army’s crack corps had to be deployed to protect the Karakoram Highway, the principal land artery between China and Pakistan, which was believed to be under threat.
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The economy, the stock exchange, and inward investment all plummeted and have never fully recovered. Neither did Musharraf. Within months,
he would be swept away to be replaced by a new government led by Benazir Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, a man Beijing found far less congenial to deal with. China’s relationship with Pakistan has never been quite the same again.

“
Pakistan is China’s Israel.”

General Xiong Guangkai
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For decades, Beijing’s secretive ties with Islamabad have run closer than most formal alliances. Founded on a shared enmity with India, China’s backing to Pakistan has gone so deep that it was willing to offer the ultimate gift from one state to another: the materials that Pakistan’s nuclear scientists needed to build the bomb. Pakistan acted as China’s backdoor during its years of diplomatic isolation, the bridge between Nixon and Mao, and the front-line in Beijing’s struggles with the Soviet Union during the late stages of the Cold War. Now, Pakistan is a central part of China’s transition from a regional power to a global one. The country lies at the heart of Beijing’s plans for a network of ports, pipelines, roads and railways connecting the oil and gas fields of the Middle East to the mega-cities of East Asia. Its coastline is becoming a crucial staging post for China’s take-off as a naval power, extending its reach from the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea. Penetration by Pakistan’s intelligence services into the darkest corners of global jihadi networks are a vital asset to China as it navigates its growing interests in the Islamic world, and seeks to choke off support for the militant activities that pose one of the gravest threats to China’s internal stability.

For Pakistan, China is the best potential ticket out of instability and economic weakness, the greatest hope that a region contemplating a
security vacuum after the West’s withdrawal from Afghanistan can instead become an integral part of a new Silk Road. China has been Pakistan’s diplomatic protector, its chief arms supplier, and its call of last resort when every other supposed friend has left it in the lurch. Virtually every important moment in Pakistan’s recent history has been punctuated with visits by its presidents, prime ministers and army chiefs to Beijing, where the deals and deliberations have so often proved to have a decisive impact on the country’s fate. Yet all of this now hangs in the balance. Pakistan is becoming the battleground for China’s encounters with Islamic militancy, the country more than any other where China’s rise has turned it into a target. As extremists at war with the Pakistani government train their sights on its increasingly powerful sponsor, this is the place where so many of Beijing’s plans for the wider region, for its relationship with the Islamic world, for its counter-terrorism strategy, and for the stability of its western periphery could completely unravel.

Sino-Pakistani ties have proved remarkably resilient since their early, tentative days. Across the last few decades they have survived China’s transition from Maoism to market economy, the rise of Islamic militancy in the region, and the shifting cross-currents of the two countries’ relationships with India and the United States. Even developments that might have pulled the two sides apart have often ended up forcing them closer together. India’s economic resurgence and the warming of New Delhi’s ties with Washington could have tempted Beijing to contemplate a policy of equidistance in South Asia. Instead China has moved to bolster Pakistan further against the rise of a more potent rival. Concerns over growing unrest in the Muslim-majority province of Xinjiang, in China’s far west, might have resulted in deepening tensions over Islamabad’s dealings with extremist groups. It has instead led China to depend all the more heavily on Pakistani security forces. And while Chinese concerns about Pakistan’s stability have undoubtedly stalled some commercial ventures, they have ultimately resulted in China doubling down on its economic support in order to help keep Pakistan’s head above water.