The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics (6 page)

The 1962 war hangs over most of the subsequent developments in the region. The ambivalent Soviet stance over the Sino-Indian border dispute—it professed a position of neutrality, and only deviated from that stance briefly because of its need to keep the Chinese on board during the Cuban Missile Crisis—was one of the last straws in the Sino-Soviet split.
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Within a few years, Pakistan’s good offices would help bring about the Sino-American rapprochement and a virtual alliance against Moscow for the remaining years of the Cold War. India’s comprehensive defeat in 1962 shifted the consensus in the country towards the acquisition of
nuclear weapons, and led to Pakistan’s subsequent decision to follow suit—with China’s help.
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1962 also helped to plant the idea of the “two front war” in the minds of policymakers in the three capitals. At one juncture, the Pakistani government suggested to the US Embassy in Karachi that Pakistan’s neutrality “could be ensured” by Indian concessions in Kashmir, implying the possibility of a military intervention if they were not forthcoming.
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“The nightmare of a combined attack by Pakistan and China, with the possibility of defeat, collapse, and even anarchy in India was much on my mind,”
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noted J.K. Galbraith, then US ambassador in New Delhi, who worried about Pakistan “forming some kind of Axis with Peking”.
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It was on Ayub Khan’s mind too, however briefly. Qudrat Ullah Shahab, a writer and senior Pakistani official, was approached by a Chinese student who suggested that he should persuade Ayub Khan to exploit the situation by moving the Pakistani army forward in Kashmir. Shahab, unsure if this might be some message from Beijing, woke the president at 3am to tell him. Ayub Khan told Shahab to “go home and go to bed”.
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Ayub had also been asked by the United States if Pakistan might make a “gesture of assurance” to Nehru, thereby enabling India to move troops towards the eastern front with China.
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He would do no such thing, and as US military assistance to India grew, he became increasingly disquieted by Washington’s “redefining the purpose of their regional pacts”.
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If the United States was going to arm non-allied India then the value of the alliance was inevitably frayed and the grounds for holding back from Beijing’s offers of friendship looked tenuous. Indeed, the lack of coordination with China in the circumstances was an active problem for Pakistan—not only had the war brought about an increase in Western backing for the Indians, but with India facing crushing defeat, Beijing had pulled back rather than taking advantage of the situation to press for a border settlement that could have included Kashmir. Pakistan’s president lamented, “I wish the Chinese had consulted us before they ordered the cease-fire and in future, too, I hope that before they take any precipitate steps they will consult us, as we may be able to give them sound advice.”
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Ayub Khan moved carefully but decisively. As his biographer notes: “The Americans and the British knew that by temperament, tradition and discipline, Ayub would not go too far with the Chinese, but he might go far enough to upset the balance of power in the region.”
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The man who became the head of the “China camp” in Pakistan’s internal debates was Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Then in his early days as
Pakistan’s youngest cabinet minister, he saw the simmering Sino-Indian conflict as an opportunity. The dispute was a chance to strengthen Pakistan’s own hand on Kashmir, and Bhutto urged Ayub Khan to take back his inopportune statement that the Sino-Indian territorial dispute was simply “India’s problem” and instead send a signal to Beijing by “questioning the very basis” of India’s stand.
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He sent a signal of his own in 1960 when he used his discretionary powers as head of Pakistan’s delegation to the UN to abstain on Beijing’s membership of the body rather than voting against it.
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Following US complaints, Bhutto’s discretion was revoked by a foreign minister still keen to adhere closely to Washington, but the tide was turning in favour of those who favoured a new tilt in Pakistani foreign policy. China’s path to war with India did indeed provide a significant opening for Pakistan, with the negotiations on the Sino-Pakistani border dispute dovetailing uncannily closely with the conflict. China had initially resisted Pakistan’s offer of talks but then moved with tremendous speed, starting ten days before the outbreak of war and concluding shortly afterwards.
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China’s reply to the Pakistani offer, which stated its willingness to sign a provisional boundary agreement, came two days before its first demarche to India over its “forward policy” in February 1962.
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The agreement had been negotiated on the Pakistani side by Bhutto’s predecessor as Foreign Minister, Manzur Qadir, under the close supervision of Ayub Khan, but it was Bhutto who arrived in Beijing in March 1963 to sign the agreement with his Chinese counterpart, Chen Yi, and win much of the acclaim.
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The settlement announced was on terms clearly favourable to Pakistan. China would transfer 1,942 square kilometres that it controlled to Pakistan.
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Although its nominal concessions were substantial, Pakistan transferred none of the territory under its control, and the final demarcation—which included six of seven contested passes—accorded closely with the line of actual control that it advocated. Pakistan was not the only beneficiary of Chinese efforts at the time—Afghanistan also saw a relatively generous agreement put in motion that same year—but the China-Pakistan accord was of genuine strategic importance.
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It infuriated India, which still claimed much of the territory in question, several thousand square kilometres of which had now been assigned to China. Notionally it was still a provisional agreement that could be reopened in the event of a broader set of talks on Kashmir. In reality, it would entrench Chinese and Pakistani control
over northern Kashmir, providing the basis for a mammoth set of infrastructure projects between the two sides which continue to this day.

The three wars that frame this chapter were the last ones in which Galbraith’s “nightmare” of an attack on India from two fronts was realistically contemplated. The nuclearization of the subcontinent fundamentally changed China’s handling of subsequent Indo-Pakistani confrontations, and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s successors were to receive an even cooler reception when they flew to Beijing during periods of conflict to solicit Chinese support. China’s leaders no longer counselled their Pakistani counterparts to prepare to wage guerrilla warfare from the hills. Instead, after 1971 the most serious military cooperation took place away from the spotlight of war. In reality, China’s greatest contribution to Pakistan’s security has never really been the prospect of an intervention on its behalf. Beijing gave Pakistan something far more important than that: the ultimate means of self-defence.

[China does] not advocate nuclear proliferation at all, but we even more strongly oppose nuclear monopolies
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Deng Xiaoping, 1975
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As long as they need the bomb, they will lick your balls. As soon as you have delivered the bomb, they will kick your balls
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Li Jue, China’s nuclear weapons chief, speaking to Abdul Qadeer Khan, head of Pakistan’s nuclear enrichment programme, about the Pakistani army
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Non-existent is the issue of China’s nuclear and missile proliferation to Pakistan
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Zhou Gang, Chinese ambassador to India
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In January 2004, a strange handover ceremony took place in Tripoli. In a meeting room at Libya’s National Board for Scientific Research, the country’s nuclear chief, Matuq Mohammed Matuq, presented two white plastic bags to Donald Mahley and David Landsman, the American and British heads of the disarmament effort in Libya. Emblazoned on the bags in red letters was the name of an Islamabad tailor, Good Looks Fabrics and Tailors. The contents were so sensitive that most of the senior members of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) did not even have the security clearance to look at them. The task of examining the documents was left to Jacques Baute, a French IAEA official,
who confirmed their veracity and sent them on a plane straight to Washington, where they were taken from Dulles Airport by armed couriers to a high security vault at the Department of Energy. One of the bags contained drawings and blueprints. The other contained detailed technical instructions. Between them, they provided step-by-step instructions for assembling a nuclear bomb.
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It was not hard to work out where they had originated. While the primary text was in English, a number of the papers were in Chinese. There was also a collection of handwritten notes based on a set of lectures given by Chinese weapons experts in the early 1980s, whose names, and the dates the seminars spanned, were included in the documents.
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The design in the documents was for a Chinese nuclear warhead, 453kg in mass, and less than a metre in diameter.
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It was notably similar to a weapon known to have been tested by China in the 1960s, the CHIC-4. While too large for Libyan Scud missiles, it could have been easily airdropped or fitted on a more sophisticated system, such as the North Korean Nodong missile or Iran’s Shahab-3 missile.
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In principle, the simple device could also have been used by terrorist groups: one nuclear expert noted that “you could drive it away in a pickup truck”.
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The documents were missing a few of the crucial designs required for implosion, but all in all there was about 95 per cent of the information needed to make a bomb
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—crude by the standards of modern weapons but smaller and more sophisticated than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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The deal that Colonel Gaddafi cut with the United States and the United Kingdom—the dismantling of Libya’s Weapons of Mass Destruction programme in return for its emergence from pariah status—was the beginning of the end for the A.Q. Khan proliferation network.
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A.Q. Khan’s nuclear black-marketeering had played a crucial role in bringing the bomb to Pakistan before those same nuclear secrets were sold to an assortment of rogue states. After years of denying US intelligence reports that had become increasingly incontrovertible, the haul of material in Libya finally forced the Pakistani government to act against the man who was then still a national hero, known as the “father” of the nuclear programme that had enabled Pakistan to go toe-to-toe with India.
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The haul even included centrifuge components that were still in their “Khan Research Lab” cargo boxes.
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Within days of the handover, Abdul Qadeer Khan was removed from his official position
by Pakistan’s National Command Authority, which controls the country’s nuclear programme, and placed under house arrest. In the aftermath, the story of his theft of centrifuge designs from URENCO, the European nuclear power consortium, and the eager customers from Tehran to Pyongyang has been widely retold.
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Over two decades, A.Q. Khan and his associates had proliferated nuclear technology, material and designs in a black market that spanned four continents. But the documents, and A.Q. Khan’s subsequent efforts to clear his name, also cast fresh light on the murky question of Beijing’s involvement in the Pakistani nuclear weapons programme, a vital precursor for his proliferation activities. While the basic facts of the two sides’ collaboration have been clear to Western intelligence agencies for a long time, some of the important details were elusive—and remain so. “The specific nature of its nuclear agreements with China” is, notes one Pakistani nuclear expert, “one of the most closely guarded secrets in Pakistan”.
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If the military relationship lies at the heart of China-Pakistan ties, nuclear weapons lie at the heart of the military relationship. Economic relations between the two sides have traditionally been weak, a problem to fix rather than a source of strength. Cultural ties have always been thin. Beyond the subcontinent, Pakistan looks to the West or to the Islamic world for intellectual and cultural influence, never to the Middle Kingdom. The underpinning of the relationship is widely understood to be a common strategic concern—about India—and the military ties that stem from it. Yet there are enduring questions about what this actually amounts to.

China has never committed soldiers on Pakistan’s behalf, even when the country was being dismembered in 1971. It has been an essential military equipment supplier, all the more so given its willingness to prop up crucial parts of Pakistan’s military-industrial infrastructure and to keep the tanks, guns and ammunition flowing when virtually all other options were cut off. This is not to be underrated. As one expert on the Pakistani army put it: “The prevailing view in the armed services appears to be that there is only one country that can be trusted to maintain military supplies irrespective of Pakistan’s internal developments.”
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But the high-end American kit—the F-16s, the Harpoon anti-ship missiles, the P-3 Orion anti-submarine aircraft—has always been more prized by Pakistan’s armed forces, and doubts about the quality of Chinese equipment persist to this day.
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A shared strategic opponent has not entailed that China and
Pakistan are joined up in their views on tactics, calculations of acceptable risk, or the legitimacy and advisability of specific military actions. And although the relationship is at times referred to as an “alliance”, it is no such thing. There have been no defence treaties, security guarantees, or serious preparations for joint military responses to different contingencies.
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When Bhutto, in 1974, suggested to Zhou Enlai that the two sides enter a defence pact, “the Chinese premier politely declined the suggestion”.
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It has stayed that way ever since. A treaty signed in 2005 gives some legal justification for one side to come to the other’s aid but no obligation.
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For a long time even the military cultures of the two countries seemed incompatible. Anecdotes from the visit of a Pakistani military delegation to Beijing in 1966, as they attempt to replace the equipment that had been lost in the 1965 war, are illustrative: