The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics (11 page)

Yet in recent years, it is striking how far the original rationale for the “all-weather-friendship” is reasserting itself. Nehru said in 1962, “It is a little naïve to think that the trouble with China was essentially due to a dispute over some territories. It had deeper reasons. Two of the largest countries in Asia confronted each other over a vast border. They differed in many ways. And the test was whether any one of them would have a more dominating position than the other on the border and in Asia itself ”.
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While the US-India deal had a significant impact on Chinese perceptions, India’s rising power in the region and beyond was already a fact that China had to address, and the pattern of relations with many of Beijing’s other neighbours since 2008 suggests that the rivalry would have intensified even without US involvement.

The difference between the spirit of the Jiang speech in 1996 and the spirit of a Chinese blogosphere that invented the term “South Tibet”
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to refer to disputed territories in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh can be seen very directly among generations of South Asia specialists in the Chinese foreign policy community.
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The older generation are almost exclusively India experts, and still stress the need for “balance” in China’s relationships with the two South Asian powers. The younger generation is seeing the emergence of a growing number of Pakistan hands who generally believe that China should accept its rivalry with India and embrace the strategic relationship with Islamabad, for all of Pakistan’s internal challenges. The spirit of the 1990s has certainly not evaporated: the older generation is, of course, the more senior in level, and Chinese sensitivities over issues such as Gwadar’s potential use by the Chinese navy continue to reflect their influence. But the younger generation is more closely attuned to the broader trends in Chinese foreign policy. Those younger specialists see China in an environment of growing strategic competition, and are more inclined to believe that a forceful stance on territorial and other bilateral disputes is a natural reflection of the realities of China’s new power position. After decades of dismissing alliance politics as a product of “Cold War thinking”, they are also more comfortable with the prospect of Beijing developing closer friendships and alliances of its own to facilitate its strategic goals.
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If the US approach to India over the last decade has been one of de-hyphenation from Pakistan, China’s has been one of re-hyphenation.
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The balancing role that Pakistan plays in Beijing’s India policy goes well beyond forcing India to keep a large number of its troops and military assets focused on its western frontier, though that undoubtedly helps. It also ensures that India is kept off balance, distracted, absorbing diplomatic, political and strategic energies that could otherwise be directed towards China. It puts a constant question mark over India’s aspirations to transcend its own neighbourhood. Every time a US Secretary of State declares support for New Delhi’s policy to “Look East” towards the Pacific, China sees another reason to keep India on edge in its own backyard.
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But while the spectrum of support that Beijing provides is a crucial enabling factor for many dimensions of Pakistan’s policies towards India, there are important limits to what China is willing to tolerate. In the past, where conflict between the two sides could be more readily controlled and limited, China could back Pakistan without paying too high a price. In a context where conflicts may take on a nuclear dimension, and where the role of terrorists and non-conventional forces blurs the lines of responsibility, that is no longer true.

China would like to see the India-Pakistan relationship exist in a state of managed mistrust, where tensions can be navigated bilaterally, economic ties can flourish despite political antagonism, and the risks of full-scale war are very distant. In other words, a version of China’s own relationship with India. An example of everything that China does not want to see came within a year of the two sides’ becoming declared nuclear weapon states—and as a result, Beijing hung Pakistan out to dry.

Eighteen months after Jiang Zemin’s 1996 visit to South Asia, India went ahead with five underground nuclear tests in Rajasthan, and Pakistan responded with six of its own in Balochistan, fundamentally changing the strategic situation in the region. In the lead up to May 1998, the relationship between New Delhi and Beijing had seemed to continue on its upswing. The Chinese chief of the general staff was on his first visit to India and plans were underway for further demarcation of the Line of Actual Control in Kashmir.
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Even verbal attacks on China by the Indian Defence Minister—calling it “potentially threat number one”—were offset through private reassurances to Beijing.
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In the end, China appeared to be riled less by the nuclear tests themselves than by the justifications given by the Indian Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. In the immediate aftermath, China’s reaction was relatively
restrained.
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Then a letter sent by Vajpayee to President Clinton was leaked to the press, stating that the threat from China—and its assistance to Pakistan—had motivated them:

We have an overt nuclear weapon state on our borders, a state which committed armed aggression against India in 1962. Although our relations with that country have improved in the last decade or so, an atmosphere of distrust persists mainly due to the unresolved border problem. To add to the distrust that country has materially helped another neighbour of ours to become a covert nuclear weapons state.
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China moved from statements that it was “seriously concerned”
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to declarations that India’s tests showed “outrageous contempt for the common will of the international community”, and expressions of “deep shock and condemnation”.
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Qian Qichen, China’s Vice-Premier, angrily stated that “This gratuitous accusation by India against China is solely for [the] purpose of finding excuses for the development of its nuclear weapons.”
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The
People’s Daily
claimed that it “wrecked in a single day the results of improving relations between these two countries over the past 10 years and more.”
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But China was not willing to sustain this performance for long. Beijing understood the rationale for India’s weapons programme perfectly well and had no intention of letting the testing derail the relationship. In the short term it even appeared to create additional diplomatic space to exploit—Beijing saw a chance to use the rift opened between Washington and New Delhi to improve ties with both sides.
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This calculation proved to be wrong. The mutual diplomatic energy invested between the United States and India following the tests, and President Clinton’s visit barely two years later, helped to lay the groundwork for a far more dramatic breakthrough in relations under President George W. Bush. It was New Delhi’s calculation that proved more accurate—its period of isolation would be brief, and the acquisition of nuclear weapons would not only serve its immediate strategic objectives, but also catalyze a shift in perceptions of its status into that of a first-rank power.

While the US, Chinese and Indian manoeuvring would continue over the next few years, Beijing faced the immediate issue of how to respond to Pakistan. First there was the ritual of a visit to Beijing from a visiting Pakistani delegation and the associated international speculation. The Pakistani Foreign Minister, Shamshad Ahmed, arrived on 19 May amid articles in the press claiming that he was seeking a “nuclear guarantee”
from China in order to stop Pakistan pressing ahead with its own test.
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One foreign ambassador in Beijing was quoted saying: “The Chinese can offer what no other country can offer, which is a public guarantee that they will reduce India to ashes if India dares to attack Pakistan. If they make this offer, which we should know fairly soon, there will be no need for Pakistan to test its own nuclear weapons.”
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This wholly implausible suggestion was neatly dismissed with the line from a Chinese researcher, “China is not a country that provides nuclear umbrellas to other countries’’.
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In fact, other than a reassurance that China would not actually sanction Pakistan, Islamabad received very little. There was no encouragement given to Pakistan’s testing and Jiang Zemin went as far as sending a letter to the Pakistani government, at Bill Clinton’s urging, discouraging it from doing so.
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Even diplomatic support was thin. China expressed its “deep regret” over the test in its swiftly issued statement, a clear contrast with its denunciations of India but very far from a tacit endorsement.
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The Chinese permanent representative to the UN initially refused to support a Security Council resolution “strongly deploring”
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Pakistan’s action—lacking “clearance to support the statement from his superiors in Beijing”—but did so the next day.
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In a nationally televised speech after the tests, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif described “the manner in which China has supported us on this occasion” as “praiseworthy” and stated that “we are proud of our great neighbour”.
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It would have been churlish not to acknowledge the backing of the country that had done so much to give Pakistan its nuclear capabilities in the first place, but however understanding of Islamabad’s position Beijing was in private, the manner of China’s public support was distinctly lukewarm.

The nuclearization of South Asia had a profound effect on how China handled conflicts and near-conflicts in the region. While Beijing continued to provide backing to Pakistan outside the context of crises—ensuring, above all, that it had the military capabilities and technologies that it required—the Jiang-Clinton double act in 1998, which resulted in the “U.S.-China Joint Statement On South Asia” that June, would set the future pattern.
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Washington and Beijing may not have seen eye to eye on the region but both sides at least agreed on the need to prevent all-out war. Given the stakes that were now involved—hundreds of millions of people threatened by the possibility of nuclear exchange, potentially even the entire population of Pakistan—Islamabad could
not expect to count on China’s support, especially if it brought the crises about itself. It would learn that lesson decisively within barely a year of its nuclear test.

In the spring of 1999, Pakistan infiltrated 1,000 troops from its paramilitary force, the Northern Light Infantry, across the Line of Control in Kashmir. The location was the inhospitable mountainous territory along the Himalayan borderlands above Kargil, where high-altitude warfare has been conducted by the two sides over the decades. Each year, the Indian and Pakistani forces retreated to their winter positions to reduce the strain of the extreme conditions on their respective forces. But this year, Pakistan put in motion a bold plan to seize the Indian positions and interdict the strategically important road running between Srinagar and Leh that functioned as the principal supply route for the Siachen Glacier.
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It was intended that the troops, posing as Kashmiri militants, would go undetected until they had time to harden their positions, forcing India to accept the occupation of the disputed territory and redraw the LoC in Pakistan’s favour. The incursion was intended to “right the wrong” of India’s seizure of Siachen in 1984 and preempt any future land-grab on India’s part. Like Operation Gibraltar and Operation Grand Slam in 1965, another set of audacious operations in Kashmir, it would involve only a handful of planners on the Pakistani side.
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Like those 1965 operations, it would go horribly wrong. Unlike 1965, the ensuing war would take place between two nuclear-armed states, the only conflict in the world to do so since the Sino-Soviet skirmishes in 1969. And unlike in 1965, China would provide no backing whatsoever for Pakistan’s position, working quietly with the United States to cut the political ground from under its feet.

General Musharraf, the lead instigator of the Kargil operation, was on a pre-arranged visit to Beijing at the end of May. At this stage, although the crisis had already started to escalate—India had detected the incursion unexpectedly quickly—the situation on the ground seemed to be holding in Pakistan’s favour. The Indian army was suffering major losses and failed to displace the Pakistani force. Air combat operations had just started, but disastrously for India, which had already lost two planes.
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Crucially, despite the discovery of a Pakistani soldier by the Indians, with his documentation and identity papers, Pakistan was still able to maintain the fiction that this was being conducted by “
mujahideen
”
rather than conventional military forces.
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Even then, it appeared that China was discouraging Pakistan from a confrontation that risked turning into all-out war.
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But the Pakistanis hoped that a negotiated settlement with the Indians would serve to consolidate its gains and so—while disappointed at the lack of support—were not overly concerned by Chinese expressions of concern and hopes of de-escalation. However, Musharraf ’s Beijing visit was notable for quite another reason. While he was in Beijing, Indian intelligence intercepted a telephone call that he received from his chief of staff.
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When the Pakistani Foreign Minister, Sartaj Aziz, met his Indian counterpart, Jaswant Singh, the next month, hoping to reach agreement on the retention of the newly acquired territory, Aziz was instead confronted with the tapes, which revealed the degree of the Pakistani army’s complicity in the Kargil operation.
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India—which subsequently released the transcripts of Musharraf ’s conversation to the media—took a firm position, demanding the withdrawal of Pakistani forces and a restoration of the status quo.
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At the same time the situation on the ground was shifting against Pakistan, as the Indian army started recapturing positions.
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The risk that the situation would actually escalate to nuclear exchanges was limited. There is some evidence that the two sides readied their warheads for possible use, though this is strongly denied by both Pakistan and India.
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The possibility of nuclear war was, however, at the top of the list of concerns for the two powers that would be dealing with the denouement of the crisis—the United States, first and foremost, and China.