China Pakistan Axis , livre ebook

Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd. - Andrew Small

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174 pages

English

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China and Pakistan, India's two most powerful neighbours, share an 'all-weather' relationship that is as reputed for its depth as it is layered in secrecy. Based on years of research and interviews, Andrew Small has put together the story of China and Pakistan's growing, and in parts troubled, friendship. The China-Pakistan Axis is essential to understanding the economic, political and security map of Asia, especially India's neighbourhood. It explains Beijing's extraordinary support to Pakistan's nuclear programme and defence planning, their strategic cooperation on India, the United States and Afghanistan, and the implications for counter-terrorism efforts. A special chapter for this Indian edition brings the book up to date on China's involvement in the Taliban talks.

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International relations

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Publié par	Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Date de parution	25 novembre 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184007657
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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ANDREW SMALL

THE CHINA PAKISTAN AXIS
Asia s New Geopolitics
RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
CONTENTS
Abbreviations
Prologue: In the Shadow of the Red Mosque
Introduction
1. A Friendship Forged by War
2. Nuclear Fusion
3. Re-hyphenating India
4. The Chinese War on Terror
5. The Trade Across the Roof of the World
6. Tea with the Taliban
7. Lord, Make them Leave-But Not Yet
8. The Dragon Meets the Lion
Epilogue
Note on Sourcing
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Follow Random House
Copyright
Abbreviations ANA Afghan National Army CENTO Central Treaty Organization CIA Central Intelligence Agency CICIR Chinese Institute of Contemporary International Relations CNPC China National Petroleum Corporation CPC also CCP, Communist Party of China ETIM East Turkistan Islamic Movement ETIP East Turkistan Islamic Party FATA Federally Administered Tribal Areas HIT Heavy Industries Taxila IAEA International Atomic Energy Agency IDCPC International Department, Central Committee of the Communist Party of China IED improvised explosive device ISI Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence IMF International Monetary Fund IMU Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan JI Jamaat-e-Islami JuD Jamaat-ud-Dawa JUI Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam JUI-F Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (Fazlur Rehman group) KGB Committee for State Security KKH Karakoram Highway LeT Lashkar-e-Taiba MCC China Metallurgical Group Corporation NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization NEO non-combatant evacuation operation NSA National Security Agency NSC National Security Council NSG Nuclear Suppliers Group NPT Non-Proliferation Treaty (Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons) OIC Organization of the Islamic Conference PLA People s Liberation Army PLAN People s Liberation Army Navy PML Pakistan Muslim League PML-Q Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid e Azam Group) PML-N Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) POW prisoner of war PPP Pakistan People s Party PRC People s Republic of China PSA Port of Singapore Authority PTI Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf S ED U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue SCO Shanghai Cooperation Organization SEATO Southeast Asia Treaty Organization SIGINT Signals Intelligence SSG Special Services Group TIP Turkistan Islamic Party TTP Tehrek-i-Taliban Pakistan UAV unmanned aerial vehicle UF6 uranium hexaflouride WTO World Trade Organization ZTE Zhongxing Telecommunication Equipment Organization
Prologue
In the Shadow of the Red Mosque 1
The Pakistanis love China for what it can do for them, while the Chinese love Pakistanis despite what they do to themselves. 2
In the early hours of Sunday, June 24 2007, vigilante groups from Lal Masijd, the Red Mosque, raided a Chinese massage parlour and acupuncture clinic in sector F-8, one of Islamabad s wealthiest neighbourhoods. 3 Overpowering three Pakistani guards, the militants, including ten burqa-clad women armed with batons, entered the house and demanded that the workers there accompany them. When the seven Chinese staff and two Pakistani clients refused, they were beaten and forcibly abducted. The vice and virtue squad took their victims to the Jamia Hafsa madrassa, a short distance from the clinic, where a spokesman announced to local press that this place was used as a brothel house and despite our warnings the administration failed to take any action, so we decided to take action on our own. 4
For the Lal Masjid radicals it was a serious tactical error. The same band of militants had been involved in a similar episode a few months earlier, when they rounded off their assault on another brothel by kidnapping four policemen. But the involvement of Chinese citizens made the June 24 incident far graver a matter. The treatment of China s overseas nationals had become a subject of acute sensitivity for Beijing. In the eyes of the more assertive sections of the Chinese public it was a test of the Communist Party s backbone, as the mocking packages of calcium pills they sent to the foreign ministry attested. 5 The imprisonment of seven Chinese workers within spitting distance of the principal government institutions of a country that was supposed to be China s closest ally was a matter of serious embarrassment. China s president, Hu Jintao, would receive regular briefings from his diplomats in Pakistan as the drama of the next seventeen hours unfolded. 6
The kidnappings set in motion a fateful chain of events that resulted, within weeks, in a bloody denouement at the mosque, and the irrevocable altering of the relationship between Pakistan s military and its militants. And while the showdown between the army and the extremist bastion in the nation s capital had been looming for some time, few would have anticipated the country that provided the final trigger for the confrontation. Not the United States, whose efforts to push Islamabad to crack down on domestic militancy were so often outmanoeuvred, but Pakistan s all-weather friend whose requests could not be ignored: China.
For all the challenges that Pakistan faced, early in 2007 things seemed to be looking up. Annual growth ran at nearly 7 per cent. 7 The inflow of foreign investment had doubled in each of the last three years, 8 and the Karachi Stock Exchange was one of the world s leading performers. 9 Three years of secret talks with India had brought the two sides tantalisingly close to a deal over Kashmir. 10 The strategic setback Pakistan faced in Afghanistan after 9/11, when it lost the government it had installed to a US invasion that it felt compelled to support, was being reversed by a resurgent Taliban. Our boys , as they were once openly described by Pakistan s interior minister, had re-taken control over swathes of the south and east of Afghanistan. 11 Even better: despite the insurgency being led, armed and financed from Pakistan, the relationship with the United States remained strong. Pervez Musharraf, the president and chief of army staff, had recently completed a visit-cum-book-tour of the United States with an itinerary that would make any American politician envious. 12 His efforts to position Pakistan as a crucial ally in the war against global terrorism continued to bear fruit, not least in the flow of billions of dollars of military aid and vital arms transfers.
China had its own part to play in this upbeat picture. The new port at Gwadar-which Chinese companies had built and mostly paid for-had just been inaugurated, promising the next Dubai on the Makran coast and an energy transshipment corridor running from the Arabian Sea through to China s booming cities. 13 Coupled with plans to expand the Karakoram Highway, which spans the high mountain passes in North-East Pakistan and North-West China, and a host of new telecommunications and mining investments, there was now hope that Pakistan s prospects might be tied to China s extraordinary economic expansion. Beijing was even there to cushion the blow of the US-India civil nuclear agreement, announced in 2005. Not only was there a prospect of China giving Pakistan a matching deal-the expansion of the Chashma nuclear power plants-but the US-India move seemed to mark the end of any temptation for Beijing to take a more balanced approach in its relations with its two South Asian neighbours. Residual Pakistani anxieties about China being lured away by India s economic boom were instead superseded by the prospect of consolidating a new axis with the emerging superpower.
But a time-bomb was ticking in the heart of Pakistan s capital. Lal Masjid and the Jamia Hafsa madrassa are located only a few blocks from the Presidential Palace, and even closer to the headquarters of Pakistan s military intelligence service, the ISI. The first mosque to be built when Islamabad was established as the seat of government in Karachi s place, it had long been frequented by the city s senior generals and politicians. 14 Yet in the years leading up to 2007, it became the epicentre of Pakistan s fraught relationship with the extremist forces that its army both sympathised with and feared, part directed and part struggled to control. Lal Masjid s ties with militants were longstanding, but in the past those links had been largely state-supported. In the 1980s, the mosque acted as an important recruiting post for mujahideen in the anti-Soviet campaign, and welcomed fighters in transit to Afghanistan and Kashmir alike. 15 Its relationship with the Taliban and Al Qaeda burgeoned in the decade that followed. The mosque s founder, Muhammad Abdullah Ghazi, met and was professedly inspired by Osama Bin Laden during a trip to Kandahar in 1998 to pay homage to the Taliban s leader, Mullah Omar. Ghazi was accompanied by his son, Abdul Rashid, who would run the mosque with his elder brother, Abdul Aziz, following their father s murder barely months later. As journalist Zahid Hussain recounts,
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 . 16
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 . 17 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. 18 Ghazi maint