The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics (15 page)

China has been intimately involved in Pakistan’s history of using irregular forces as an instrument of its military strategy. For all the early disagreements between Zhou Enlai and Ayub Khan about the utility of guerrilla warfare, it proved to be one of the two sides’ closest areas of tactical cooperation. In the early 1960s, the Pakistani army launched a series of studies of the concept of low intensity conflict.
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While Mao and Zhou had
urged Pakistan to do so in the context of a defensive strategy in a war with India, the Pakistanis’ greatest interest in Maoist military doctrine was from the offensive side: a people’s war in Kashmir. Pakistan had already used non-state actors in Kashmir—largely Pashtun tribal militias—in the first Indo-Pakistani war in 1947, but the 1965 and 1971 wars involved more systematic attempts to put the approach into practice.
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In 1965, companies of irregulars were infiltrated across the Line of Control in the (mistaken) belief that local forces would rise up in support.
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And in 1971, irregular forces were raised in East Pakistan, some of which were believed to be responsible for among the war’s worst atrocities.
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China and Pakistan even collaborated directly. For much of the 1960s and 1970s, Beijing armed and trained insurgencies in India’s northeast, such as those among the Nagas and the Mizo.
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The Manipuri rebels, who received training in Tibet, named their militia force the “People’s Liberation Army” in tribute to their instructors.
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China even dallied with the idea of aiding the Naxalites, India’s Maoist movement, a group of whom met with Mao Zedong and intelligence chief Kang Sheng in 1967.
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Pakistan’s support, mostly run out of East Pakistan, went back even further, and it was the Pakistani military that would make some of China’s early connections. In 1962, when one of the Naga militants stopped over in Karachi en route to meet with the exiled leader of his group in London, his Pakistani hosts introduced him to a “Chinese friend”, who promised aid and military assistance.
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Five years later, China came through on its promise: Beijing went on to train groups of Naga fighters in western Yunnan, who made their way there through the jungles of northern Burma
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and returned to India equipped with assault rifles, machines guns, and rocket launchers.
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In May 1969, China and Pakistan established a coordination bureau “to oversee the supply of arms, training and funding” to the various insurgent groups.
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While formal state assistance to the north-eastern insurgencies was cut off under Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese military has never backed away entirely, with arms continuing to flow from China too freely to be dismissed as the work of a few rogue salesmen. The seizure of a mammoth haul of illicit Chinese weapons in Bangladesh in 2004, destined for Naga and Assam groups, was the biggest in Bangladeshi history.
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On an even larger scale, however, and of deeper lasting consequence, was the joint effort to help the
mujahideen
in the 1980s against the Soviet Union. Beijing supplied a large share of the guns and ammunition that
would arm the
mujahideen
’s efforts, paid for by the United States and Saudi Arabia, and managed by Pakistan, whose intelligence services ran the campaign, trained the fighters, and mostly controlled who received the weapons.
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For the United States and China the primary focus was the Soviet Union, but Pakistan had a longer-term agenda, one even more central to its national goals. Not only could the Pakistani military systematically test out the use of irregular forces in Afghanistan, a country where it was keen to acquire “strategic depth”, but the influx of weapons, men and money could be readily redeployed eastward.
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Kashmir had been in General Zia’s mind from the very inception of the war. In early 1980, Zia met Maulana Abdul Bari, a JI leader who had been involved in the 1965 operations.
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He told Bari that the Afghanistan campaign was a means to “prepare the ground” for a larger conflict in Kashmir, and that ammunition and financing from it would be diverted to the Kashmiri cause.
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When asked who in the Afghan campaign would receive the biggest share of arms and financial assistance, he replied: “Whoever trains the boys from Kashmir”.
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JI and Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front volunteers would indeed receive training at ISI camps in the 1980s.
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When the opportunity came to redirect resources in Afghanistan more decisively towards Kashmir after the Soviet withdrawal, it was the camps in Afghanistan under the control of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami, Pakistan’s favoured faction among the
mujahideen
, that provided the initial flow of fighters. The training facilities in Paktia brought together the Arab, Afghan and Kashmiri guerrillas who would later show up in Indian territory with the very same Chinese-made weapons that had been supplied to arm the anti-Soviet campaign.
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The United States was sufficiently concerned about the redirection of arms that it warned the Indians about the risk to politicians and government officials visiting Kashmir, who they feared might be targeted by the long-range sniper rifles that had been sent to Pakistan to kill Soviet military officers.
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The cross-pollination of personnel, financing, training, weapons, and ideology between these different militant organizations—Afghan, Kashmiri, sectarian, and global terror groups such as Al Qaeda—would eventually metastasize beyond the control of the Pakistani government, but for much of the 1990s they worked hand in glove. The legacy of the 1980s was not simply the rise of well-trained, well-armed militant groups, but the rise of the state apparatus to manage them. Across the
period, the ISI would emerge as the force it is today, changing from a backwater institution to a financially flush and autonomous powerhouse in Pakistan, which established and consolidated control over the Kashmiri militant groups and many of the forces involved in the Afghan campaign.
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This was not a one-way process. Over time, the line between the objectives of the Pakistani state and those of the Islamic militants blurred. Some individuals in the security services started to demonstrate as much affinity with the extremists, all the more so when they became “former” agents who maintained close liaison relationships with both the militants and their previous employer.
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As Hamid Gul, one of the leading examples of this phenomenon, stated when asked about his plans to maintain training camps for the
mujahideen
after the Soviet withdrawal: “We are fighting a jihad, and this is the first Islamic international brigade in the modern era. The Communists have their international brigades, the West has NATO, why can’t the Muslims unite and form a common front?”
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At the time he was still the chief of the ISI.

This creeping reverse influence took place in concert with Zia ul Haq’s broader Islamization agenda. One of his first moves as army chief was to change the army’s motto from Jinnah’s “Unity, Faith, and Discipline” to “Faith, Piety, and Struggle in the Path of Allah”.
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Zia allowed members of the fundamentalist organization Tablighi Jamaat to preach at the Pakistani Military Academy, encouraged commanders to join their troops in congregational prayers, and instituted assessments of troops’ religiosity.
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He changed the recruitment patterns for the military, drawing in larger numbers of lower-middle class recruits—who were seen as more vulnerable for targeting by JI and other religious organizations—rather than relying on the traditional military families.
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The lines were perhaps at their fuzziest in the case of the Taliban. In one sense the Taliban were the ultimate ISI asset, financed and militarily supported by literally hundreds of Pakistani advisers in their campaign to consolidate control in Afghanistan.
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In many other respects, though, they exacerbated precisely the problems they were supposed to solve—fostering Pashtun nationalism rather than calming it, bolstering militants in Pakistan rather than redirecting their attention, and ideologically influencing elements in the Pakistani army rather than operating under their control.
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One retired ISI officer said that the ISI’s operatives in Afghanistan “became more Taliban than the Taliban”.
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Beijing would ultimately come to view these developments—the rise of Pakistani-
supported militant groups, the changing nature of the Pakistani army, and the “Talibanization” of Pakistan—with greater and greater unease, but that was a long way off. In the 1990s, while China treated growing extremism in the region as a matter of concern, it still seemed that the nexus between the militants and the Pakistani military could be used to its advantage.

Despite their religious bonds, the situation of the Uighurs has hardly been a
cause célèbre
in Pakistan or the wider Muslim world. Located at the far fringes of Islam’s heartlands, “East Turkestan” does not even feature on many purported maps of the Caliphate. What concern there is for the Uighurs’ situation has tended to come mostly from Turkic compatriots in Central Asia, Germany, and Turkey itself, rather than from South Asia or the Middle East. In Pakistan, Xinjiang’s low status in the hierarchy of popular causes is compounded by the fact that relations with China are seen as simply too important to allow a few disaffected Uighurs to get in the way. Even Pakistani religious groups have been willing to minimize their significance for the sake of ties with Beijing—as Hussain Haqqani notes: “Magazines and newspapers associated with the Jamaat-e-Islami amplified the theme that Muslims around the world had an obligation to free their coreligionists from Soviet communist occupation. Muslims in Eastern Turkistan—China’s Xinjiang province—were also initially identified for liberation, but the development of close ties between China and Pakistan made their liberation a lesser priority.”
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Mosque closures, destruction of religious texts, restrictions on Islamic education, bans on fasting during Ramadan, and other measures meted out to the Uighurs by the Chinese state over the years have never mobilized angry street protests in Pakistan in the way they would if a Western power were responsible.
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There have been attempts to reconcile this uncomfortable trade-off between religious solidarity and geopolitical necessity. Pakistani criticism of the Uighurs’ irreligiousness or fondness for drink (for which Uighurs criticize Pakistanis too) casts aspersions on their standing as Muslims.
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Conspiracy theorists claim that Turkistan separatists are supported by the United States or India in order to drive a wedge between China and Pakistan.
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Either way, when it comes to dealing with the Uighurs, Islamabad has always been willing to act at Beijing’s behest.

At times the Pakistani government has addressed the issue very directly, whether cracking down on Uighurs whose terrorist credentials
were at best thin, or working to restrict the flows of people, propaganda and arms across the border to China. In the late 1990s, the community centres in Rawalpindi, Kashgarabad and Hotanabad were closed down, leaving hundreds of Uighurs homeless.
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Uighur students, whom China claimed were responsible for a series of bombings in 1997, were deported,
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and there are claims that the Pakistani military executed a number of Uighurs at a training camp.
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The ecosystem of Islamic militancy in the region that Pakistan fostered was more open to their Uighur co-religionists, however. Extremist groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan may not always have been willing to support terrorist operations in China itself, or to take up the “East Turkistan” cause in a serious way, but they have been happy to welcome the additional recruits to the jihadi movement. The Pakistani government sought to manage this, translating its relationships with militants into a channel that could be utilized on Beijing’s behalf. The ISI used its influence to dissuade the groups that it sponsored from directing any of their energies towards China. It also facilitated meetings for Chinese officials and intelligence agents to strike deals with whomever they needed to in order to isolate the Uighur militants from potential supporters among extremist organizations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
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As a result of its own concerns with domestic terrorism, China has often been portrayed as if it is naturally aligned with states facing similar threats. In many respects, however, its security has been parasitic on the fact that these groups consider the United States, India and other countries to be higher priority targets. Beijing’s preference has been to make offers, not enemies. Its pitch to Islamic militants in the region generally took the same form: don’t bother us and we won’t bother you. Depending on who China was talking to, money or the offer of small arms supplies might be put on the table too.
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In return, Beijing expected that not only would the groups themselves refrain from targeting China, they would also refuse any support to Uighur organizations that did.
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China’s efforts were wide-ranging. At one end of the spectrum were the Pakistani religious parties who trooped to Beijing in 2000 to declare their support and friendship; their
madrassa
s and training camps had been used by Uighurs,
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and China wanted that stopped.
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With the Taliban, whose relationship with Beijing is explained in greater depth in Chapter 6, China reached an understanding: Afghanistan would not be used as a base for ETIM attacks, and Beijing would gradually move
towards the normalization of relations with the largely isolated Taliban government, including vital economic support.
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Chinese intelligence agents are even believed to have met Al Qaeda to sound out its intentions.
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In the 1990s those intentions were certainly not hostile. Osama Bin Laden went as far as to refer to China in his public statements, claiming in 1997: “The United States wants to incite conflict between China and the Muslims. The Muslims of Xinjiang are being blamed for the bomb blasts in Beijing. But I think these explosions were sponsored by the American CIA. If Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and China get united, the United States and India will become ineffective.’’ He went on to say, “I often hear about Chinese Muslims, but since we have no direct connection with people in China and no member of our organisation comes from China, I don’t have any detailed knowledge about them.”
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For Al Qaeda, as for other jihadi groups, the default position was that it was better to avoid taking Beijing on. Not only did they have quite enough enemies already, but as Bin Laden’s remarks suggest, there was also the sense that China and the jihadis had a couple of adversaries in common.