The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics (26 page)

This was not just a hopeful punt on the part of the Afghan officials. Even as China’s economic engagement with Afghanistan was stalling, its diplomatic engagement was increasing exponentially. For years, Chinese diplomats were known for turning up to the array of international jamborees on Afghanistan’s future, reading out their talking points, and then playing virtually no role at all in the remainder of the proceedings.
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Bilateral relations were amicable but distant—Afghanistan’s top leadership would troop off to China from time to time but there were no reciprocal visits of any comparable seniority. Then, in 2011, everything started to change. Not only did Chinese officials suddenly appear to care about the agreements that were being reached in major international gatherings
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in Istanbul and Bonn, they were willing to disagree openly with Pakistan—the Holy Grail, from Afghanistan’s perspective, given China’s influence over its friend.
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The shift in behaviour was stark: “Before, you would attend meetings on Afghanistan and the neighbours would be silent, and here you have them taking a lead,” said one of the diplomats in attendance at the Istanbul summit, in an interview with Reuters. “The Chinese for the first time were very comprehensive and constructive, you could really see an elevated role of China in the region and more outspoken than ever before.”
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Another official states, “They were very vocal and raised several issues during the drafting. We weren’t even allowed to begin the final version until the Chinese delegation had arrived.”
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China was also convening a flurry of meetings of its own, with bilateral and trilateral get-togethers with Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia and whatever other configuration looked like it might be useful,
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even conspicuously including India.
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Its meetings with the Taliban intensified, taking place in Pakistan and even in China itself, and the contents of these exchanges started being relayed to other countries rather than being kept closely held between Beijing and Islamabad.
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Afghanistan also received the first visitor from the Chinese politburo standing committee in several decades, Zhou Yongkang, the security chief.
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For observers who were used to a Chinese political approach in Afghanistan that prioritized avoiding attention, there was suddenly a lot that stood in need of explanation. Some analysis of
Zhou’s visit, for instance, pointed to his former role at CNPC and his reputation as chief of China’s oil lobby to suggest that resources were the motivation for his surprise trip. It was nothing of the sort. “We don’t really have economic interests in Afghanistan right now,” argued one Chinese analyst. “None of the projects are moving. There’s only one concern there: security.”
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China was paying serious attention to it again, and the catalyst for the surprising acceleration in Chinese activity was an increasingly ominous date: 2014.
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The Americans were leaving.

Personally, I must have said on no less than ten occasions to my American friends that the United States should aid Pakistan
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Deng Xiaoping, 1979
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Our friend is in trouble and we need to provide as much help as possible
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Yang Jiechi to Richard Holbrooke, 2009
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When President Obama spoke to President Xi he said ‘We are not Afghanistan’s neighbours, you are neighbours. You should be ready’. Now we are ready
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Chinese official, 2014
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On Friday 24 August 2012, two US Hellfire missiles struck a militant training camp in the Shawal valley, near the border of North and South Waziristan. The target of the drone strikes was Abdul Shakoor Turkistani, the chief of Al Qaeda’s forces in FATA, who was killed along with three of his commanders. Turkistani had been appointed as Al Qaeda’s leader in the tribal areas in April 2011, a few weeks before Osama Bin Laden’s death. A jihadi newsletter claimed that he was “supervising training camps”, as well as preparing militants for attacks in Europe and the United States.
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He was known to be a member of Al Qaeda’s executive council, the
majlis shura
. His position on the US
targeting list, therefore, was hardly controversial. But he had another identity too. Abdul Shakoor—or Emeti Yakuf, one of his other commonly used pseudonyms—was the head of the Turkistan Islamic Party, the Uighur militant group still known to Beijing as the East Turkistan Islamic Movement.
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Yakuf was one of those believed to have been responsible for the propaganda videos threatening attacks on the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
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One of the European attacks he appeared to have been plotting was an attack on the Chinese embassy in Norway.
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When China had issued an eight-man “most wanted” list of terrorists in 2008, he was the second person named, and on 15 February 2010 he took over the job of the man who occupied the number one slot.
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His predecessor had suffered exactly the same fate. In May 2010, Abdul Haq al Turkistani, ETIM’s previous leader, was also killed in a US Predator air strike, on a compound in the village of Zor Babar Aidak, near Mir Ali in North Waziristan.
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Abdul Haq had been the figure most closely involved in ETIM’s deepening relationships with other militant groups in the border region, and was an influential enough leader to represent Al Qaeda in its dealings with insurgent forces in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. A few months earlier, he had been seen at a meeting with Baitullah Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban chief, and several senior commanders of the Afghan Taliban.
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The deaths of these two leading figures—and two others on the eight-man list who also lost their lives—would be a serious blow for ETIM and a major victory for the Chinese government. And US drone strikes were not just decimating ETIM’s leadership, they were also responsible for the deaths of some of its most important supporters. In July 2012, six Uzbeks belonging to an IMU splinter organization that was close to ETIM were killed in a strike.
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In June 2012, the top Al Qaeda ideologue who had called for a jihad against China—Abu Yahya al-Libi—was the victim of four missiles fired at another North Waziristan compound.
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Thirteen Uighurs and two Turks, all of them confirmed by ETIM as its members, were killed in Afghanistan’s Baghdis province in another Predator strike a few weeks before Abdul Haq, a major loss for a group that may only number in the tens.
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While ETIM and its supporters were supposed to constitute China’s main terrorist threat, there was no question that it was the United States that was proving to be their most lethal opponent. Yet this was a role that should have been occupied by Pakistan: all the names on China’s
“most wanted” list were believed to be living on Pakistani soil. In 2003, Pakistan’s army had been able to claim the credit for taking out the previous ETIM leader, Hahsan Mahsum, in an operation in South Waziristan.
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But since then, it had not been delivering results. The eight-man target list that China issued in 2008 was made public partly as a dig, published as it was on the eve of President Zardari’s visit to Beijing, and partly as a gesture of despair. The Pakistanis had been sitting on the names for years and nothing seemed to have been happening. Pakistan handed over nine Uighur militants to the Chinese in 2009, but as long as members of ETIM’s top leadership were operating in territory controlled by groups that Pakistan considered to be the “good Taliban,” they appeared to be safe.
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Then the US drone campaign began in earnest. ETIM’s leaders were both killed in locations that Pakistan had been unwilling to touch—a region in North Waziristan under the authority of a Taliban commander, Hafiz Gul Bahadar,
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who was linked to the ISI-sponsored Haqqani network
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and periodically engaged in peace deals with the Pakistani army.
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US officials roundly denied that Washington was doing any of this for Beijing’s benefit. But it was hard to escape the fact that the United States had done more to support the elimination of “anti-Chinese elements” in Pakistan in two years than the Pakistani government had in ten. Pakistani officials were sheepish: “It may have taken a U.S. missile to kill one of China’s most wanted Muslim separatists. But still, the Chinese probably see this as a good development,” as one Pakistani security official put it.
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The Chinese wondered, nonetheless, why they were relying on their strategic rival to accomplish the task rather than the country that was supposed to be their closest friend.

Since 9/11, the mantra that the United States and China have common objectives in the region is one that Beijing has been happy enough to recite without really believing it to be true. Both sides could agree that “stability” was good and “terrorism” was bad, but at any level of specificity, the picture quickly became clouded. Beijing’s counter-terrorism strategy has been essentially parasitic on the United States being a more important target for transnational militant groups than China. With the exception of ETIM and its supporters, Beijing’s interest was not to embroil itself in a battle with extremists in the region, it was to ensure that it didn’t get on the wrong side of them. That meant steering
well clear of whichever side the United States was on. “Stability” in Afghanistan was not especially appealing to the Chinese either, if it just meant a stable environment for the United States to entrench its military presence.
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China was far happier to see the US army embroiled in a series of debilitating wars across the Middle East and South-West Asia than either of the alternatives—a successful consolidation of US power in the region, or a heightened US focus on East Asia. Yet in the period since President Obama took office, there is no doubt that the two sides have moved much closer together in both their dealings and their views on the region. From a starting point where China seemed determined not to involve itself in Afghanistan, was unwilling to engage in meaningful exchanges about Pakistan, and refused any bilateral cooperation with the United States in either country, it has reversed its position on all counts. The basic reasons for this are clear enough: the United States is withdrawing from Afghanistan, and the aftermath looks worrying. Without the geopolitical threat of “encirclement” by US bases that had such a hold on China’s strategic imagination, Beijing has started to view the future of the region through a very different prism. But it has been the security developments in Pakistan that have had the most potent impact. China’s doubts over Pakistan’s handling of militancy within its borders, whether ETIM, the TTP, or the longer-term threat posed by the creeping advance of extremism in Pakistani society, have led it discreetly to find common cause with Washington on a growing array of issues there. One former senior US diplomat stated: “There used to be a group of countries that China wasn’t willing to talk to us about properly. Pakistan is the only one that’s left.”
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Within a few more years, that may no longer be true.

For veterans of the US-China relationship, any talk of Pakistan conjures up an almost nostalgic sense of the two periods during which the country was at the heart of bilateral relations, and those relations themselves were in their warmest phase. First, when Islamabad was playing its discreet and vital role as matchmaker, in the secret diplomacy of the 1970s, to bring Washington and Beijing together, and second, in the 1980s when the triumvirate were in their quasi-alliance against the Soviet Union. Across nearly two decades, China and the United States shared an interest in Pakistan’s fate and believed that some degree of synchronization of messages and support might be helpful. After the anxious efforts at coordination during the 1971 war, detailed in the first
chapter, Chinese officials consistently urged their US counterparts to give Pakistan more aid and better weapons than China could provide itself, and even weighed in on Pakistani politics. American and Chinese leaders compared notes on the messages the two sides were sending to Zia ul-Haq about the situation of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, whom neither side wanted to see executed, and even whether China might offer him asylum (Deng: “If he wants to come, then we will be prepared to receive him”. Brzezinski: “He could use the same villa as Sihanouk did!” Deng: “I think he has a better place.”).
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But in subsequent decades, the China-Pakistan relationship would disappear into a secretive space from which it has still not fully emerged.

Following the end of the Afghanistan campaign, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the Tiananmen Square protests, both Sino-US relations and US-Pakistan relations took a sharply negative turn. After more than a decade of turning a blind eye to Pakistan’s nuclear programme, there was no longer a strong enough political imperative for Washington to continue to do so. And China was no longer a Cold War friend but a country that suddenly looked like it was on the wrong side of history, and potentially an economic and military rival over the long term to boot. China and Pakistan had enjoyed relatively healthy military-military ties with the United States, but suddenly saw arms supplies cut off and sanctions imposed. Pakistan was the third largest recipient of US aid behind Egypt and Israel, most of it being military aid; in 1990 it was abruptly stopped.
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The Pressler Amendment required American assistance to be cut off if the administration failed to certify that Pakistan was not in possession of a nuclear device, a position that became virtually impossible to maintain. US military sales to China were suspended the day after the world watched the PLA’s tanks and machine guns trained on unarmed students.
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