The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics (22 page)

MCC and its partner, Jiangxi Copper, prepared a mammoth bid for the mine that included plans to construct an on-site power plant, an associated coal mine to fuel it, a cement mill, and—at the request of the Afghan government—a railway line connecting the mine to the Uzbek and Pakistani borders. 10,000 jobs were promised.
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The companies worked hard to persuade the new Mining Minister, Mohammad Ibrahim Adel, and his superiors that their bid should be looked on favourably. Adel certainly did that, advocating for MCC throughout the tendering process, and China’s proposal showed distinct signs of benefiting from inside information from the ministry of mines.
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Allegations persist—“with a high degree of certainty”, according to a US official cited by the
Washington Post
—that a $30 million bribe paid in Dubai heightened the minister’s desire to smooth things along.
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Nevertheless, for the Afghan government the numbers looked good anyway: three $808 million payments, royalties at 19.5% (one of the highest in the world), and investments that could end up totalling as much as $10 billion.
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It surpassed the other bidders on virtually every count. Aynak was more than just a good deal for the Afghan state, it was potentially a big step towards providing it with an autonomous financial underpinning: estimates suggested that it could generate $390 million of tax
revenue a year, nearly a 50% increase in the government’s income.
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The initial investment alone would represent more than 70% of all the investments in the country from 2002 to 2007 and 35% of all the international assistance provided across the same period.
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A commitment from a major Chinese company was attractive for another reason too. Afghan leaders hoped that China’s relationship with Pakistan might help to protect the mine, the revenue stream, and possibly even the future security of the country.
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Would the ISI really allow their assets to attack Chinese facilities? The Afghan government hoped not. Any insurgent advance on Kabul would now worry Beijing too, with the mine barely 20 miles south-east of the capital. On 20 November 2007, the ministry of mines made the formal announcement that everyone had been expecting. The Chinese consortium had won the contract, opening a new chapter in China’s relations with Afghanistan.
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What MCC could not have anticipated, however, was Aynak’s elevation to a symbolic status that supposedly made the copper mine deal representative of virtually everything about Beijing’s approach to the country and the long war that was intensifying there. Rarely has so much been written about a mine from which so little was actually extracted. The drumbeat began almost immediately after the announcement. “While America is sacrificing its blood and treasure, the Chinese will reap the benefits,” argued Robert Kaplan, claiming that China was “free-riding on the public good we offer”.
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“We do the heavy lifting and [China] picks the fruit,” echoed S. Frederick Starr.
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With China contributing nothing to the military campaign and very little by way of aid, the case that it somehow hadn’t “earned” the juicy contract wasn’t hard to make. There were even claims that American soldiers had taken on the responsibility for physically protecting the mine from Taliban attacks.
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While that was untrue in a narrow sense, the notion that China was unfairly taking advantage of the Western security presence in Afghanistan proved difficult to shake off.

From Beijing’s perspective, the argument was more than a little odd. Certainly the Aynak site needed an immediate level of protection, like other such projects in an insecure neighbourhood, but if there was one thing China did not want to see, it was a rival power setting up a long-term military presence in its backyard. Beijing had been deeply concerned about US bases in Afghanistan and the wider region since the very first days after 9/11. Afghan officials routinely described their
Chinese counterparts pulling out maps of the country, stabbing their fingers anxiously at the various locations, and pressing them about Washington’s grand designs.
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What’s more, however ambivalent China was about the prospect of the Taliban taking control of the country again, it had dealt—and continued to deal—amicably enough with them when it needed to. Beijing’s approach in Afghanistan relied on a carefully hedged policy that avoided picking sides or making unnecessary enemies. Any perception that the Chinese were only able to extract resources under the condition of armed American protection against the insurgency would be entirely antithetical to China’s goals not only in the region but in the wider Islamic world.

In the end, free-riding was to be the least of the US or the Afghan government’s concerns. Six years later, with production at the facility still to begin, the conditions of the contract being renegotiated, and an emergency trip by Hamid Karzai to China to determine whether the whole deal might be abrogated, the real question was whether the Chinese companies would risk taking a ride at all.
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If Aynak symbolized anything it was that for China, Afghanistan remains largely a land of threats, real, potential, and imagined, rather than one of opportunities. The moment at which Beijing finally realized it had to take some responsibility for influencing the political and security situation there had little to do with its multi-billion dollar investments and a lot to do with its fears that chaos in Afghanistan might end up destabilizing two places it cares about a great deal more: Pakistan and Xinjiang.
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Technically, Afghanistan is China’s neighbour, but only just. They share a tiny sliver of a border at the Wakhjir pass, 47 miles long, which has been closed to through-traffic since the founding of the PRC. On the Chinese side, the Karakoram Highway runs close by, winding its way towards the nearby Khunjerab pass and on into Pakistan. China’s frontier patrols have use of a recently built road that turns off by the border,
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but this new construction is not the result of any undeclared plans to open the route up: it is to make it easier for the security services to keep the border sealed. On the Afghan side is the Wakhan corridor, a narrow, mountainous, sparsely populated salient that forms part of Badakhshan province. The infrastructure there is even less developed—a rough road finishes 100km away from the Chinese border.
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The two countries have not actually been neighbours for that long. The only reason a China-Afghanistan border exists at all is because of
the 1895 agreement between London and St Petersburg to keep their two empires geographically separated, with Wakhan as a buffer.
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The deal involved neither the Chinese nor the Afghans, and elicited complaints at the time from the emir of Afghanistan about being stuck with “the Kirghiz bandits in the Wakhan”.
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Tajikistan and Pakistan are now the states kept apart by the thin strip of land. The border area is underdeveloped for good reason. For decades, Afghanistan has represented a security threat to China because of either the military presence of a strategic rival or the risk of Islamic militancy spilling over into Xinjiang, and more recently both at the same time. While the Afghan government has approached Beijing about the possibility of putting a direct transit route in place, China’s reluctance to contemplate doing so has deep roots.
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The closed border has proved a reliable means of containment.

For the first decades of the relationship, Afghanistan was largely peripheral to China’s interests. Kabul recognized the new Chinese government relatively quickly, on 12 January 1950, but Beijing moved slowly to respond, with diplomatic relations only being formally established in 1955.
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In contrast to its policies in many other countries in the region, China gave little support to communist parties in Afghanistan, its non-aligned status for a time sparing it the Cold War machinations in which China felt prompted to involve itself elsewhere. The two sides reached a border agreement in the flurry of Chinese diplomatic activity that took place after the war with India in 1962, but although subsequent years saw an exchange of state visits, a treaty of non-aggression, and agreements reached on trade, aid and economic cooperation, it remained a thin relationship that rarely drew attention in Beijing.
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That started to change in the 1970s, as a series of convulsions in Afghan politics appeared to draw the country closer and closer to the Soviet Union. Each time there was a changeover of government in Kabul—the 1973 coup, the 1978 Saur revolution, and Hafizullah Amin’s seizure of power in 1979—China had doubts over whether to extend recognition to the new regime, and feared that if Moscow’s hand was not actually behind the coups, it was only a matter of time before Afghanistan became a full Soviet ally.
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The outright invasion in December 1979 at least provided greater clarity on that count.

As it would a quarter of a century later, Afghanistan moved from being a country that China felt it could safely ignore to being geostrategically central. As one Chinese media outlet put it at the time: “It is
precisely because Afghanistan is of vital importance to the Soviet global strategy that the Soviet Union has taken the risk of seizing it.”
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Some of the language that Chinese officials used openly at the time in their assessment of Moscow’s intentions and the impact of its military occupation on China’s interests would be used again privately after 9/11 to refer to the United States. While Afghanistan’s geostrategic location was believed to have provided the general rationale for the Soviets’ actions, its particular effect on China was “encirclement”, especially when combined with Moscow’s presence in Asia.
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The building of long-term bases was seen as proof of the Soviet Union’s intentions for a permanent presence, which would help it gain “a strategic edge over China and Pakistan”.
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Unlike the United States though, the Red Army occupied the Wakhan corridor, building an air base in Badakhshan, and creating anxieties about another front across which Soviet attacks on Chinese territory could ultimately be launched.
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Beijing also feared that Moscow would push on from landlocked Afghanistan towards the Indian Ocean. As Geng Biao, the Chinese Vice-Premier, put it: “If the Soviets’ barbarous aggression goes unchecked, the next target is Pakistan.”
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The solution was resistance. China would give massive support to the Afghan rebels, who would “explode the myth of the invincibility of Soviet hegemonism,” Xinhua declared in 1980.
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China was already starting to agitate against the Soviet presence even before the invasion, and as early as April 1979 the United States had learned from Afghan sources of Beijing’s willingness to supply weapons to the
mujahideen
.
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In the 1980s that would be substantially ramped up, and Afghanistan became a central front for China. In what has been described as one of the most important clandestine operations in the PRC’s history, Beijing became the arms-supplier-in-chief for the guerrilla war against the Soviet Union.
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In the early years of the campaign in particular, when the United States was trying to downplay the scale of its involvement, Washington not only wanted to avoid having US weapons turning up on the battlefield, but also sought to source them from other Communist countries, providing deniability of US involvement.
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This necessitated purchases from states like China that were able to provide Soviet-designed weapons. The range provided by Beijing was extensive, from AK-47s and RPG-7s to 107mm rockets and 60mm mortars. At Pakistan’s request, the Chinese even brought back into production a single-barrelled rocket launcher that the PLA itself had
discontinued.
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Easily handled by one man, it would play a vital role in the
mujahideen
’s attacks on Kabul. Until 1984, China provided the bulk of all the arms and ammunition supplied,
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and continued to supply them on such a scale that large unused caches were being found in Afghanistan more than a decade after the Soviet withdrawal.
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The coalition of countries involved in the operation was broad, with weapons coming from Egypt and Israel, among others, but China was in the central group. Along with the CIA, the ISI, and the Saudi General Directorate, “There were four intelligence services that met every week in Islamabad”, according to Afghanistan scholar Barnett Rubin.
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China’s activities in Afghanistan even had the imprimatur of the CPC red aristocracy: the man who acted as an assistant military attaché in Islamabad in the early 1980s, facilitating liaisons with the ISI during the
mujahideen
’s campaign, was Mao Zedong’s grandson, Kong Jining.
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While strategic considerations were important—Deng Xiaoping expressed his desire to turn Afghanistan into a “quagmire” for the Soviet Union—China also profited handsomely from the weapons sales.
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The money came from the United States and Saudi Arabia, and is estimated at $100 million a year for the Chinese military in the first few years of the campaign alone,
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“huge profit margins”, as Steve Coll describes them, during a period when it was desperate for cash.
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Arms purchases were agreed with the CIA station in Beijing, and although a small proportion of them, typically 10–15%,
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were provided as “aid”, the American officials negotiating the deals found that Beijing drove a hard bargain.
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Nominally, China’s direct involvement was limited. Most of the weapons were sent by sea to the port at Karachi, at which point the ISI took over.
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The only exceptions were a few air-freight deliveries and the supply of Chinese mules, which were sent down the Karakoram Highway before being used as a means of transport for weapons and supplies across the mountains into Afghanistan.
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Pakistan was determined to control the flow of arms to its preferred groups, as well as the strategic direction of the war, and some Pakistani officials insist to this day that China’s direct relationships with the
mujahideen
were restricted to the small Maoist faction, Shola e Jawed or “Eternal Flame”.
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One notable member of that group, Rangin Spanta, went on to become Afghanistan’s foreign minister and national security adviser under President Karzai,
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but most of them were killed by Pakistan’s closest allies among the
mujahideen
, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami, in
the bloody infighting in Peshawar that followed the war.
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China’s interest however went well beyond the Maoists, who ultimately received little serious support. Beijing is believed to have infiltrated ethnic Tajik military officers into Afghanistan in order to circumvent Pakistan’s restrictions and establish direct links with groups that would go on to form the Northern Alliance.
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Ahmed Shah Masoud, one of the leading commanders, was known to be among the direct recipients of Chinese military aid.
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