The result of Pakistan’s recent parliamentary election has been an unexpected victory for the country’s moderate, secular, democratic forces; a defeat for the already discredited president, retired general Pervez Musharraf and the Islamic parties; a mixed blessing for Pakistan’s dominant ally, the United States; and potentially a positive development for the country’s low-key long-term ally China.
The Bush administration had banked on Musharraf as the strongman who would save Pakistan from Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, continuing as America’s indispensable ally in its "War on Terror."
However Musharraf was swept aside in a landslide not by the Islamists, but by the modernist secular parties, the late Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party and Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League. Musharraf came out a distant third. The reason for Musharraf’s loss is that the electorate viewed him as America’s stooge in a war that the people don’t want. The winners want Musharraf out, and the Bush administration is tinkering with the result of this election by pondering ways to keep Musharraf in a modified role.
With the Musharraf question remaining unsettled and the US continuing to interfere in a post-election settlement on his behalf may be detrimental to Washington’s long-term interests in Pakistan.
Pakistan’s other great power ally, China, has played its cards more prudently. On the basis of its sacrosanct principle of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs--except when Chinese are killed or kidnapped--Beijing kept an open mind, and its think tanks advocated "no commitment" to Musharraf and pragmatism, according to D.S. Rajan in a January 2008 paper for the South Asia AnalysisGroup.[1]
The Chinese nevertheless became involved in Pakistan’s recent descent into chaos. After the abduction and killing of Chinese technicians and businessmen on several occasions, China demanded, in unusually forceful language, better protection for its citizens against terrorism. Among violent events in Pakistan during 2007 was the July storming of the Lal Masjidin Islamabad, at Musharraf’s orders, to end the occupation by religious militants, most of them seminarians. Nine days earlier, in a self-styled anti-vice campaign, these militants had kidnapped the Chinese boss and six Chinese women from a massage parlor. As 15,000 army troops were preparing to choke off the militants’ supply of food, water and electricity, tension further escalated after three Chinese were executed near Peshawar in Pakistan’s Northwest. An enraged Musharraf abandoned his slow strangulation strategy and ordered an all-out assault. The BBC reported 173 deaths, but Pakistani witnesses reported that more than 1000 people were killed. Some Pakistani analysts blamed Musharraf’s excessiveness, at least in part, on Chinesepressure.[2]
The US favored a political settlement, based on reconciliation between Musharraf and exiled former Prime Minister Bhutto, to be legitimized by a general election. Bhutto’s assassination by a suicide-bomber was a major blow to this scenario and resulted in a new explosion of violence, but nevertheless the elections could not be postponed indefinitely. As to Musharraf’s position in this unpredictable flux, a prominent Chinese academician argued that the "destiny of one person" should not decide the political system in Pakistan, implying that the remedy lies in political institutionalization.3
While the US-Pakistan alliance, dating from 1954 was an unstable, intermittent Cold War marriage of convenience, the China-Pakistan link is, in Huntingtonian terms, a "Confucian-Islamic inter-civilizational brotherhood," variously described as "an all weather friendship... sweeter than honey ... and as high as the Himalayas and as deep as the Indian Ocean." The China-Pakistan alliance was conceived in 1962 when Pakistan felt betrayed by the US, after the latter rushed to the aid of India following its defeat in the border war with China. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, foreign minister under President Ayub Khan since 1963, became the architect of the almost exclusive strategic reorientation of Pakistan towards China.
China became Pakistan’s arms supplier with no strings attached, and Pakistan became China’s backdoor to the Indian Ocean and the Middle East and its comrade-in-arms for the containment of India. Pakistan considered American inaction during the 1965 Kashmir War a second betrayal. The US-Pakistan alliance became defunct and was only briefly revived by an American show of naval force to reassure Pakistan during India’s liberation of Bangladesh in 1971.
However, China remained the cornerstone of Pakistan’s foreign policy because it was the only country that fully identified with its anti-India goals. In 1965 Bhutto requested China for the first time to help Pakistan develop the bomb, but Beijing turned him down. After the amputation of East-Pakistan and India’s nuclear tests in 1974, China changed its position and began assisting Pakistan with the enrichment of weapons-grade uranium and transfer of missile technology, which lasted through the 1990s. During the 1980s, training of Uygurs from Xinjiang by the Pakistani military to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan became an irritant in Sino-Pakistani relations. When the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s with the full backing of Pakistan’s military, China became apprehensive about Pakistan turning into a catalyst for an Islamic revival in its troubled Western region.
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After the 9/11 attacks on the US, China became aware that Pakistan was more part of the problem on the two most contentious issues--terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction--than of the solution. Its "strategic partnership" with Pakistan on the old basis--containment of India--had become untenable. China’s access to the Indian Ocean, alternative energy-supply routes from the China-invested port of Gwadar on the Persian Gulf and economic development of China’s Far West provided a new rationale for a revamped strategic relationship.
In 1969 China had already started construction of the Karakoram Highway, the first phase of "China’s Long March South to the Indian Ocean." During President Musharraf’s visit to China in February 2006, Pakistan requested that China help with its upgrading and Musharraf said, "This road, when upgraded, will provide the shortest route to the sea for products manufactured in China. The same road can serve to provide an overland route for trade between China and India, thus linking two of the largest markets in Asia." In November 2006 the two countries signed a free trade agreement aiming to expand trade to $8 billion in 2008.
Despite its disenchantment with the current state of Pakistan and improving relations with India, China is strongly committed to its vital long-term friendship with Pakistan. Apart from economics, the ethnic and religious peace of its far western region depends on close cooperation with its southwestern neighbor. Hu Shisheng, a Chinese specialist in South Asian politics at the China Institute for Contemporary International Relations in Beijing, sums it up:
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We will contribute to its stabilization. A stable Pakistan is essential for building a stable Xinjiang. A disintegrated or dismantled Pakistan will be a disaster for us. We know that during the American campaigns in Afghanistan and operations in Pakistan, Uygurs were caught. There are huge tribal areas there which have run themselves for centuries. Without close cooperation with Pakistan, how can China ensure stability there? 4
China and Pakistan have their own version of Lord Palmerston’s famous dictum, "Nations don’t have permanent friends, only permanent interests." China and Pakistan have vowed to be permanent friends and regularly update their solid common interests. The US may have to readjust its volatile relations with Pakistan for a fifth time.
Willem van Kemenade is a senior fellow at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations "Clingendael" in The Hague and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC.
1 D.S. Rajan, China-Pakistan Ties: Is Beijing looking beyond Musharraf ? South Asia Analysis Group, Paper no. 2544, January 9, 2008.
2 Tarique Niazi, China, Pakistan and Terrorism, Foreign Policy in Focus, July 16, 2007.
3 Ye Hailin, International Herald Monitor, Beijing, January 3, 2008, quoted in SAAG paper 2544.
4 Interview with Hu Shisheng, Beijing, 3 January 2008.
Rights: © 2008 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. YaleGlobal Online
