The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics (29 page)

If these developments were too small in scope to suggest that Beijing was really intending to play a more significant role in dealing with Afghanistan post-2014, an array of developments in 2012 left less doubt. In June, Afghanistan was formally admitted as an observer to the SCO, the regional organization that China had formed and in which it still plays a leading role.
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A bilateral “partnership agreement” was signed during Karzai’s visit to Beijing for the SCO summit.
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And in September, China sent the first politburo-level visitor to Afghanistan in forty years, Zhou Yongkang, the security chief.
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The same year, its level of involvement in regional diplomacy intensified—China started convening an increasingly regular sequence of trilateral and bilateral meetings: China-Pakistan-Afghanistan; China-Pakistan on Afghanistan; China-Russia-India on Afghanistan;
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and China-India on Afghanistan, to name only
a few.
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In its meetings with the United States, Beijing even started to suggest that it might play a role on the vexed issue of political reconciliation in Afghanistan through talks with the Taliban, with whom China had been conducting meetings of its own.
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After many years in which its exchanges with the Taliban had essentially been kept covert, the fact that China was, as one former Chinese official claimed, “the only country other than Pakistan that has maintained a continuous relationship with the very top leadership of the Taliban” was a potential asset now that the United States was seeking a political solution rather than a military one.
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Beijing’s own meetings with the Taliban, which took place with Pakistan’s encouragement, were more about allaying Chinese concerns about whether they would allow Afghanistan to become a base for Uighur separatists, and sounding them out about their intentions.
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“I would describe them as ‘contacts’ rather than serious meetings,” argued one Chinese expert.
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But the Taliban representatives also expressed their support for a Chinese role in facilitating a political reconciliation process in which they were looking for any leverage they could gain over what they saw an overbearing Pakistan presence.
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For Pakistan, the shift in China’s position from bystander to activist could be portrayed in a positive light. This was in evidence in April 2011 when Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Yousuf Gilani, and the ISI chief Shuja Pasha sat down for a meeting with Hamid Karzai in Kabul. Gilani told Karzai that the US had “failed” both their countries, and that Pakistan’s economic problems meant it could not be expected to support long-term development projects in the region.
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China, he suggested, would be a better partner, and was ready to take on a greater role.
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The press reporting on the meeting, based on leaks from the Afghans in attendance, was met with a raft of denials from the Pakistanis, whose foreign ministry spokesperson described it as “the most ridiculous report we have come across”.
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But it reflected the reason why Pakistan had been so keen for the new trilateral conclaves with the Chinese and the Afghans to go ahead—the Kabul government’s uniformly hostile view of its future relations with Islamabad might be reframed if Pakistan’s capacity to act as spoiler of Afghanistan’s security was sweetened with the promise of Chinese money.

In other respects, though, Beijing’s decision to involve itself to a greater degree in Afghan affairs as the 2014 transition approached made Pakistan uncomfortable. In the past, Islamabad had virtually been given
a free hand there. For two decades, its aid to the Taliban barely elicited a bat of the eyelid from its closest security partner, and much of Beijing’s Afghanistan policy was effectively run through Pakistan. But now, China was starting to express preferences of its own, which were different enough from those of the Pakistanis to act as a constraint.
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China cared more about stability in Afghanistan than Pakistan did, and was considerably less hung up on India’s role in the country, which many on the Chinese side saw as potentially helpful if it took the form of investment and support for political stability. For Beijing, the overriding priority was simply to steer the different forces in the country towards a political settlement that would help fend off the worst-case scenarios that it feared: civil war, a buoyant insurgency that could destabilize Pakistan too, proxy wars taking off between New Delhi and Islamabad, and an environment in which terrorist groups hostile to China might flourish.
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The Afghans, who had already planted seeds of doubt about how reliably the Pakistanis were addressing Chinese counter-terrorism concerns, saw a little room to create daylight between Islamabad and Beijing, and plenty of political and economic benefits that might accrue from an expanded Chinese role in the country.
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“Pakistan’s interests are still central to our Afghanistan policy but we don’t see things the same way”, noted one Chinese official, “They’re more optimistic about the Taliban than we are, and more optimistic about controlling them. We’re not so sure…We’re talking to the first generation Taliban, the Quetta Shura, but the second generation is different. We can deal with the Pashtunwali version but not the Wahhabi version.”
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These concerns on China’s part—and the prospect that they might nudge it towards the role of regional stabilizer—would also have important implications for its relations with the United States.

Afghanistan has been at the nub of a broader shift in US policy, officially dubbed the “rebalance” to Asia but still more often referred to by its original, catchier title: the pivot.
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The drawing down of the US presence and paring back of strategic focus in South-West Asia was supposed to facilitate the scaling up in East Asia. As Hillary Clinton’s article that gave birth to the term put it:

As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivot point. Over the last 10 years,
we have allocated immense resources to those two theaters…. One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will…be to lock in a substantially increased investment—diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise—in the Asia-Pacific region.
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While this is still framed in diplomatically broad terms about addressing the “opportunities and challenges” presented by the world’s most dynamic region, much of the focus is on dealing with one challenge above the others: a rising, and increasingly assertive China. The Asia pivot was portrayed as bringing an end to what the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Kurt Campbell, described as a “a little bit of a Middle East detour over the course of the last ten years”.
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It was a detour that Beijing believed left it with a crucial period of license while Washington was bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the United States to turn to China for help in this part of the world while pursuing what Beijing inevitably dubbed a “containment” policy in the Asia-Pacific region smelled to some Chinese like a trap.
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It looked distinctly like the Americans leaving behind a mess in the region for China to clean up, dragging it into the looming chaos in its western periphery just as the US-China competition in East Asia was heating up.
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Others in China, however, see a chance not only to enter a political and economic space that the United States is vacating, but to do so in a way that is consonant with both US and Chinese objectives and potentially a way of stabilizing the relationship itself.

The argument was formulated most forcefully by Wang Jisi, one of China’s leading foreign policy intellectuals, who advanced the case for China “marching West” as the US pivots to the East.
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He contended that Beijing’s internal efforts to rebalance between coastal and interior regions need an international strategy to underpin them, drawing on China’s traditional historical, economic and political focus on the interior rather than the maritime realm. On the economic front, the “westward” economy, running down the old Silk Road, now has the highest growth rate and the highest growth potential. On the security front, he argues that the separatist, terrorist and extremist threat is best negated through a strategy to stabilize not only China’s western periphery but also the countries surrounding it. And above all else, that unlike in East Asia, which was increasingly taking on the qualities of a zero-sum game with the United States, China’s western periphery sees “significant scope for cooperation” in investment, energy, counter-terrorism, non-
proliferation and regional stability, with an “almost non-existent risk of military confrontation” between the two sides.
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Wang’s position as one of the country’s most influential advisers on US-China relations has in many ways been eclipsed by the ascendance of more hawkish voices who believe that Washington and Beijing are destined for strategic rivalry. The “march West” argument itself was viewed unsympathetically by those in the PLA who viewed the military (and naval) buildup that China was undertaking in its east as the essential security task over the years to come.
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For others, it was simply counterintuitive—looking west from China, the obvious images that come to mind are fragile states, rising forces of Islamic militancy, major narcotics flows, and the world’s fastest growing nuclear arsenals. It is to the east that the more obvious opportunities for economic development and the demonstration of military prowess lie.
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But when the new leadership in Beijing took office in November 2012, it soon demonstrated that it bought important elements of the underlying case that Wang Jisi had been making. At the very least, it appeared to believe that a rising power of China’s stature should be able to advance east and west, walk and chew gum at the same time. And the country that would do most to determine whether a march west would end in triumph or disaster was Pakistan, which had a new leadership of its own.

Our leaderships have been enthusiastic advocates of comprehensive, meaningful ties, and to this end, have also visited China, often more times than warranted. They have also loved to sign agreements, seeing them as photo ops, but then failed to execute them or occasionally, to even honour the commitments made. Resultantly, the Chinese are disappointed but too polite to say that we lack both the focus and capacity, to the required degree, to bring these projects to fruition. But more than anything, it has been China’s deep misgivings about our less than categorical commitment to confronting the menace of extremism and militancy that continues to raise doubts and misgivings in Beijing
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Tariq Fatemi, 2013
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Nawaz Sharif wasn’t going to make the same mistake as his predecessor. Asif Ali Zardari’s decision in 2008 to jet off to Dubai, London and New York before belatedly making China his first “official” overseas trip was never entirely forgiven in Beijing.
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Sharif’s maiden visit, by contrast, was being planned before he had even been sworn into office.
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He had serious business to do there. On 11 May 2013, his party had won an unexpectedly comprehensive victory in the parliamentary elections, the first in Pakistan’s history to take place after a civilian government had completed a full five-year term. Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), the long-standing rival party to Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N), had been routed, holding on to only a handful of seats outside its traditional base in Sindh.
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There would be no need for the anticipated period of
concessions and coalition-building—Sharif ’s comeback from military coup, prison, and forced exile in Saudi Arabia was already complete.
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After years of stagnant growth, his mandate from the Pakistani people was clear: “The economy, the economy, the economy”, as he proclaimed at the PML-N’s victory party.
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Sharif ’s election campaign had been a blizzard of plans to get it functioning again—new motorways, industrial zones, bullet trains and, above all, fixing Pakistan’s chronic energy problems.
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For all these ambitions, there was an obvious place to turn for financing, knowhow and sheer industrial muscle. Yet after years in which the major economic initiatives with China had languished, convincing Beijing that Pakistan was a better investment bet now that the conservative Punjabi industrialists were back in charge would be no easy task.

Sharif and the Chinese had dealt with each other plenty of times before. This was, after all, the third stint as Prime Minister for the man dubbed “the Lion of the Punjab” by his supporters, and Beijing maintained extensive ties with his brother, Shahbaz Sharif, during his years as Chief Minister of their home province. But during the two sides’ previous interactions in office, Nawaz Sharif was an altogether weaker figure. His last official visit to China as premier was a desperate shuttle during the 1999 Kargil fiasco in a fruitless bid for Chinese support, while he fended off acute challenges to his position at home. Those were the final days of a cycle that had seen Sharif and Benazir Bhutto alternately holding power and conniving with the army to depose each other. Beijing knew who was really running the show, and when General Musharraf seized power a few months later, Chinese officials carried on as if nothing had really changed. Not only did China not mind governments run by the army, it generally preferred them. For much of Zardari’s term, Chinese officials would mutter that they missed dealing with Musharraf and military rulers who could “get things done”.
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Their half-hope was that the elections of 2008 might just be another temporary aberration before normal service was resumed. But for the last few years, the PML-N had operated as the Loyal Opposition, ensuring that Zardari’s government, however fragile or unpopular, would not be forced from office. Sharif wanted to return to power with civilian rule in Pakistan as a normal fact of political life, not as a gift from the army that could easily be taken away.
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