American historians do not usually argue that SEATO or CENTO held any military value for Pakistan. But they do contend that Pakistan derived considerable benefit from the treaties and did so without acquiring additional responsibilities. As a result of its memberships in the treaty organizations, Pakistan was able to lay claim not just to American resources but also to a far greater share of US attention. And the Pakistan military was afforded numerous opportunities to interact with other militaries. Still, neither side had many illusions about the basis of the alliance. Americans generally understood that, despite Pakistan’s professed rejection of communism, its participation in these arrangements was driven primarily by its fear of India and secondarily by its desire for access to US military equipment, training, and doctrine, all of which had an important impact on Pakistan’s military posture and military capabilities. It is less obvious what tangible benefit the United States derived from the relationship before 1959, when, in return for the gift of more than one dozen US-made F-104 fighters, Pakistan agreed to permit the United States to open a communications facility at Badaber airbase some 10 miles outside Peshawar. The United States built a substantial communications facility at Badaber to monitor Soviet plans and activities and used it to fly U-2 spy aircraft into Soviet airspace. The Americans felt that they had finally obtained something “of great importance for US national security” (Kux 2001, 92; see also McMahon 1994).
In May 1960, the Soviets announced that they had shot down a U-2 and its pilot, Gary Powers, near Sverdlovsk (in contemporary Ukraine). Powers had taken off from Pakistan with the intention of flying across Soviet airspace to photograph defense installations. The announcement came as the leadership of the United States, France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union were assembling in Paris for a much anticipated summit. The incident obviated the summit and put Pakistan in an awkward position. The Soviet Union made clear that if any American plane were “allowed to use Peshawar as a base of operations against the Soviet Union” it would “retaliate immediately” against Pakistan (Kux 2001, 112–113).
The Pakistani response to the incident is telling and bears more than a passing resemblance to its current obfuscating position on US drone strikes (International Crisis Group 2013). As dictated by the standing agreement, the US State Department claimed that the United States had conducted the U-2 flights without Pakistan’s knowledge, much less permission. The Pakistani government followed suit with protests that the flights were not authorized by Pakistan. This episode, perhaps more than any other preceding it, demonstrated to the Pakistanis that the alliance with the United States might entail significant risks. Ayub began to distance himself from the United States, realizing that Pakistan might have cultivated an unhealthy reliance on an unreliable partner. This realization motivated him to try to improve ties with Moscow and provided further impetus to reach out to China (Kux 2001; McMahon 1994).
Tensions between the United States and Pakistan persisted. In 1962, the Americans offered India military assistance in its war with China. Pakistan was dumbfounded that the United States would aid Pakistan’s enemy—a country that, furthermore, remained nonaligned. Pakistan was again disappointed in 1965, when the United States cut off all military aid to both India and Pakistan in response to the outbreak of war between the two states. Pakistan was disproportionately affected by the cutoff, as it was more dependent on US weapons systems. Stretching the truth to the breaking point, Ayub “reminded” the Americans of their obligation to help Pakistan, “a victim of naked aggression by armed attack on the part of India” (Pande 2011, 100). Although he did not deny Operation Gibraltar3 and even conceded that Pakistan had used US-provided weapons in the operation, Ayub still had the temerity to request further assistance. The US ambassador to Pakistan, justifying the US embargo, told then foreign minister Z. A. Bhutto that “it was a fateful decision you took to plan, organize, and support the Mujahid [freedom fighter] operations” (Kux 2001, 162; see also McMahon 2011; Pande 2011).
Pakistan was again doomed to disappointment during the 1971 war with India. Although the treaty language clearly limited defense assistance to communist threats, Pakistan believed that the United States had an obligation to defend its ally against India. Even though Nixon violated US law by continuing to provide Pakistan with defense equipment despite the embargo imposed from the 1965 war, Pakistan did not believe that the United States did enough to protect Pakistan from the inevitable vivisection (Bass, 2013). Following the loss of East Pakistan, Pakistan finally withdrew from SEATO. The relationship between the United States and Pakistan hovered in limbo until the Soviet invasion, when the two once again began to work in concert.
Chasing China: The All-Weather Friend
Compared with the voluminous material on US–Pakistan relations, the literature on Sino-Pakistan relations is relatively sparse. Scholars agree that in 1949 Pakistan warmly welcomed the new communist leadership of China. Pakistan’s leaders quickly understood that the communists would hold China’s seat on the UN Security Council. Also, given that the Security Council was considering the Kashmir question, Pakistan had far more incentive to cultivate than to antagonize communist China. For China’s part, the new government was isolated and embargoed, with most countries following America’s lead in refusing to recognize the communist government. With few allies, it welcomed Pakistan’s friendly gesture. Curiously, both China and Pakistan successfully avoided any serious confrontation over Pakistan’s formal commitments to anticommunist treaties. Both states had their own motivation to downplay this reality. For its part, China did so by characterizing Pakistan as a victimized pawn in US imperial designs, whereas Pakistan did so by arguing that China is not a predatory, imperial regime like the Soviet Union.
In 1949, Pakistan faced a major economic crisis when it refused to devalue its currency at the same time as India. In response, India ceased all trade with Pakistan. In urgent need of an alternative market for its raw cotton and jute, and of a new source of coal, Pakistan finalized a barter agreement with China according to which China would purchase Pakistani cotton in exchange for coal. China thus emerged as an important and powerful ally against India. Aparne Pande (2011, 115) rightly observed of this episode: “Pakistan’s rulers and strategists have not forgotten this incident. For them, it was another demonstration of the ‘untrust-worthiness’ of ‘Hindu’ India and evidence that India and Indian leaders had not accepted Partition and wanted to break up Pakistan” (see also Amin 2000).
But a closer look at the early years of the Pakistan–China relationship suggests that Beijing was less invested than this episode might suggest. From October 1949 until mid-1950, China was in a state of revolutionary militancy. China displayed scant regard for Pakistan during this period: even though Pakistan recognized the communist government on January 4, 1950, and supported its claim to the UN Security Council seat, China did not dispatch an ambassador to Pakistan until September 1951 (Barnds 1975).
China showed particular forbearance when Pakistan joined SEATO and CENTO, two pacts meant to combat the spread of communism, and when Pakistan backed the UN action in Korea and the efforts of UN military forces to unify the peninsula. There are several possible explanations for this unusual tolerance. First, it was clear by this time that China would not have peaceful relations with India. Early attempts at Sino-Indian rapprochement had foundered on the issue of Tibet. India vocally opposed China’s occupation of Tibet in late 1950, arguing, among other things, that as a successor state of the British Raj it inherited the Raj’s relationship with the territory. Pakistan, in contrast, was indifferent to the situation. Second, while Pakistan was a member of both SEATO and CENTO, it consistently signaled that it had no ill will toward China. Pakistan opposed naming China an aggressor in the Korean War and all trade embargoes on China. It was clear to Chinese leadership that Pakistan’s participation in SEATO was directed at India rather than China and that Pakistan “did not go beyond what was necessary to maintain American aid” (Barnds 1975, 469).
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Chinese state media used a sympathetic tone when discussing Pakistan’s predicament. One editorialist wrote, “It is common knowledge that US war-makers for a long time have been trying to drag Pakistan into planned US Middle East and Southeast Asia aggressive blocs and to convert Pakistan into an important war base for the United States in the region. … The US war-makers want to take advantage of Pakistan’s strategic position. … The United States is sparing no effort to use Pakistan to link its aggressive power in the Middle East with that in Southeast Asia” (Pande 2011, 117). China publicly placed the blame on the United States for foisting these alliances on a desperate Pakistan.
Chinese leaders realized that, despite Pakistan’s formal association with SEATO and CENTO, China could achieve greater benefits by not forcing Pakistan to choose between China and the West. China’s support of Pakistan made it nearly impossible for either the United States or the Soviet Union to entrench itself across the length and width of the subcontinent as long as the Indo-Pakistan rivalry persisted. Equally important, China could forge a “close working relationship with a Pakistan hostile to India in order to keep New Delhi as preoccupied as possible within the subcontinent and thus reduce its ability to challenge China” (Barnds 1975, 466). Moreover, just as its ties with India put Soviet Russia in a better position to affect the balance of power in Asia, “China’s ability to frustrate Soviet designs is furthered by keeping Pakistan—which stands astride the overland route between the U.S.S.R. and India—outside anything resembling a Soviet sphere of influence” (ibid.). Given Pakistan’s willingness to support other Chinese goals, and the fact that it provided China with political and physical entrée into the Middle East, China found it best to endure Pakistan and its anticommunist commitments (Kux 2001; McMahon 1994; Pande 2011).
The nature of the understanding between the two states was encapsulated in remarks delivered by Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai at the April 1955 Afro-Asia Summit in Bandung (Indonesia), following at least two private meetings with Bogra. Zhou told the conference political committee “that he and the Pakistani prime minister had reached an understanding on matters of ‘collective peace and cooperation.’ He had received the assurance that Pakistan would not support any aggressive action that the United States might launch against China under the SEATO treaty and that she neither opposed China nor apprehended aggression from her” (Syed 1974, 61–62). According to another account, Zhou added, “we achieved a mutual understanding although we are still against military treaties” (Arif 1984, 9).
Bogra, addressing the same summit, took the opportunity to distinguish between the Soviets and the Chinese. He argued that China must be viewed as distinct from the Soviet Union: the former was an imperialist power, whereas the latter had never brought other nations “under its heel” or made them into satellite states (Syed 1969, 109). Bogra insisted that Pakistan “wanted good relations with Beijing, notwithstanding the security arrangement with the United States” (Kux 2001, 71). In 1956, Zhou and Bogra exchanged state visits, at the conclusion of which they issued a joint statement explaining that neither their countries’ differing political systems nor their divergent views on many problems should “prevent the strengthening of friendship between [them].” Both reaffirmed their commitment to expanding cultural and commercial ties and placed “on record that there is no real conflict of interests between the two countries” (Joint Statement Signed by the Prime Minister of Pakistan and China, 1956).
Sino-Pakistan ties came under some strain when Ayub seized the reins of power in 1958. This was partly the result of Chinese domestic politics. In 1958, the Communist government announced the Great Leap Forward, which the Communist Party boasted would “propel China to surpass Great Britain in industrial production in 15 years and the United States in 20 or 30 years” (Li and Yang 2005, 841). The plan ended in ruin. Bad central planning and weather catastrophes contributed to a famine, among the worst in recorded history, that caused the premature death of some 16.5 to 30 million people (ibid.).
The second reason for the frost was Ayub himself: he was personally more inclined toward the United States and was sensitive to US anticommunist commitment. Pakistan’s position on China’s membership in the United Nations also shifted as it moved closer to the United States: for several years Pakistan voted against seating communist China (Barnds 1975). Pakistan jointly sponsored a UN General Assembly resolution criticizing China’s suppression of the 1959 Tibetan uprising. And in 1959, Ayub offered India a joint defense agreement that would protect them both against Chinese or Soviet aggression. India immediately rejected the proposal, and Pakistan turned towards China once again (Pande 2011; Raghavan 2009).
China did not completely ignore these mood swings. When Pakistan changed its position on the Chinese seat at the United Nations, Beijing labeled it an unfriendly act. Chinese papers accused Pakistan of playing imperialist propaganda tunes and conniving in anti-Chinese activities. One Chinese paper oddly cautioned Pakistan to “pull up the horse before [the] precipice” (Barnds 1975, 469–470). Yet seen in the grand scheme of things, China’s criticism was still relatively muted. China, like Pakistan, had few options: Sino-Indian tensions were mounting, and its détente with the Soviet Union was disintegrating. The United States and India were drawing closer, signing an agreement covering defense assistance prompted in large part by India’s 1962 conflict with China. Russia’s continued alignment with India further discomfited China (Amin 2009; Pande 2011).
In 1961, after several turbulent years, China and Pakistan began once again to attempt to improve their relationship. Several events galvanized this warming. China sought to exploit the growing Pakistani anger with US assistance to India, despite the latter state’s persistently nonaligned position. Closer ties to Pakistan would serve as a lesson to the Soviet Union that its strategy of using India to counter China was not without consequences. What is more, such an approach would be relatively inexpensive for China as it would “not require [Beijing] to assume the burden of supplying Pakistan’s external needs as long as Pakistan’s links with the US were not completely cut—something [Beijing] never demanded” and likely never wanted (Barnds 1975, 470–471). For Pakistan’s part, Ayub’s realization that conflict between India and Pakistan would continue and that the United States would help India against China forced him to reassess China’s value.
The most important impediment to increased Sino-Pakistani engagement and cooperation was their outstanding territorial dispute. In September 1959, Pakistani authorities noticed that Chinese maps were labeling parts of Hunza, claimed by Pakistan, as Chinese territory (Anwar 1969). In October 1959, the two countries began negotiations on the border in what appeared to be a mutually beneficial transaction (ibid.). China was willing to settle the border dispute in exchange for Pakistan’s support of communist China’s admission to the UN. In 1962, the two countries came to a provisional agreement, with final disposition pending resolution of the Kashmir dispute. India was discomfited by this development, as the border negotiations between Pakistan and China were taking place against the backdrop of mounting Sino-Indian tensions in the run up to the 1962 Sino-Indian war.
The Chinese–Pakistan border agreement was signed in 1963, a few months after the conclusion of the Sino-Indian war. India dismissed the border agreement as illegal; for its part, China refused to discuss border demarcation with India and adhered to its policy of not recognizing Kashmir’s accession to India (Amin 2000; Pande 2011). Syed (1969, 111) dismisses the “impression in certain quarters abroad” that the border agreement was related to the 1962 Sino-Indian War. Anwar claims that China ceded 750 square kilometers to Pakistan “beyond the main watershed of the Karakoram range” while Pakistan “surrendered no part of the territory under its control.” While the new territory offered few economic or other advantages, the agreement brought Pakistan manifold political benefits. First and foremost, it removed an irritant in Sino-Pakistan ties. Second, it gave Pakistan secure possession of key parts of the Indus River wat
ershed. It also provided China with an opportunity to reject India’s claim that Kashmir was entirely Indian. Finally, it both gave substance to and justification for the increasingly friendly ties between Pakistan and China (ibid.).
Once the border question was settled, Pakistan and China quickly sought to deepen their relationship. Because the lack of air routes connecting the two countries limited commercial and other traffic, in 1963 they signed a civil aviation accord. The United States vociferously objected, calling the accord “an unfortunate breach of free world solidarity” (Kux 2001, 143). For the first time, the US government imposed consequential penalties on Pakistan: the John F. Kennedy Administration indefinitely postponed a $4.3 million US Agency for International Development loan to build a new airport in Dhaka (the planned departure point for the flights to China). All things considered, this was a relatively mild sanction given the importance countering China held for US foreign policy of the time. Perhaps more problematic for the United States, Pakistan ceased negotiations regarding an expansion of the “communications intercept facility” in Badaber (ibid.). In the same year, Pakistan and China granted each other Most Favored Nation Status and opened up trade and shipping facilities. Pakistan began importing metal and steel products from China as well as cement, coal, machinery, chemicals, and other items and exported cotton and jute, cotton and jute products, sporting goods, leather, and surgical instruments. In July 1964, China offered Pakistan a $60 million loan, to be used to purchase Chinese goods (Pande 2011).
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