by Andrew Small
And there is one more act of Sino-Pakistani proliferation that may yet take place, though disentangling truth from fiction in the many stories surrounding it is a challenging task. Nuclear cooperation between China and Pakistan has long had an interested third party. The question is whether and how that country might decide to cash in its chits.
The establishment of Sino-Saudi relations had a “Kissinger moment” of its own. Much as Pakistan acted as the middleman for the Sino-US rapprochement, so too were Saudi Arabia and China brought together with Islamabad as the conduit. In Kissinger’s place was Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the éminence grise of Saudi foreign policy, and like the US opening it caught everyone completely off-guard.
In 1985, Saudi Arabia was seeking intermediate-range ballistic missiles but Saudi officials were making no headway in Washington. The Pakistanis suggested that the Saudis consider another option, which they were willing to help facilitate.105 Bandar, then ambassador to the United States, duly floated the prospect of a purchase to his Chinese counterpart.106 He received his answer in Pakistan. During Bandar’s visit, on the pretext of talks about the two sides’ petrochemical industries, he met with Chinese officials in the garden of their embassy in Islamabad. The message they delivered was clear: “Yes”; and “Come to Beijing to discuss the details”.107 Saudi Arabia had no diplomatic relations with China at the time and Bandar and his half-brother, General Khaled Bin Sultan, made a series of secret trips to Beijing and to Chinese missile bases elsewhere in the country, across the course of which an agreement was thrashed out.108 The missiles in question were East Wind (Dong Feng) CSS-2 missiles, which were distinguished by the fact that they were highly inaccurate, serving little military use with conventional warheads, designed instead for the purpose of carrying nuclear ones. Fifty of these intermediate-range missiles and nine launchers were sent to Saudi Arabia amid elaborate concealment.
The incident, when finally discovered by the United States, would bring about one of most serious crises in the history of its relations with Saudi Arabia, and a near-conflict with Israel—but, for the Saudis, it was worth it. Riyadh was deeply concerned about the Iranian threat, which was vividly manifested at the time by the Iran-Iraq war, into which the Saudis risked being drawn. The justification given by Khaled Bin Sultan is that they were seeking “a weapon which would make an enemy think twice about attacking us”, “not intended to be used, except as a last resort” and seeking it from “a country able to supply such a weapon at speed and without constraining conditions”.109 The Chinese and the Saudis both provided assurances to the United States that they would not be armed with nuclear warheads, but the missiles’ presence on Saudi soil has posed a standing question ever since. A number of accounts suggest that Riyadh, which provided substantial financing to the Pakistan’s nuclear programme,110 has reached an agreement that would see Pakistani warheads transferred into the Saudis’ possession if they decide that the security situation in their neighbourhood requires it.111 The speculation has been fanned by the Saudis themselves. In May 1999 Prince Sultan, the Saudi Defence Minister, visited the nuclear enrichment facility at Kahuta and the missile factory at Ghauri,112 the first foreign visitor who had been allowed there apart from the Chinese (even Benazir Bhutto was denied the opportunity to visit Kahuta while she was prime minister).113 On the same visit he met A.Q. Khan, who made a return trip to Riyadh later that year. Despite the obvious issues over their provenance, when Saudi defectors and Israeli intelligence officers fed out stories about a Saudi-Pakistani nuclear deal in the intervening years, they had an undoubted verisimilitude.114
But it has been the advances in the Iranian nuclear programme—and in the West’s negotiations with Tehran—that have elicited claims from US and Saudi officials that seem to carry greater weight. King Abdullah himself warned visiting US envoy Dennis Ross in 2009 that if Iran crosses the nuclear threshold “we will get nuclear weapons”, and there was a flurry of stories citing intelligence reports about warheads “waiting and ready” in November 2013 when the Iran intermediate deal was on the eve of completion.115 Even President Obama’s former non-proliferation chief, Gary Samore, stated at the time, “I do think that the Saudis believe that they have some understanding with Pakistan that, in extremis, they would have claim to acquire nuclear weapons from Pakistan.”116 It is a leap to imagine an outright transfer of Pakistani warheads to Saudi control, as opposed to an arrangement that simply places Pakistani-controlled missiles on Saudi soil. But if it ever happened, the original Saudi missiles—or even the updated models that it is believed the Chinese may have provided—were designed to carry precisely the same nuclear warhead design that China transferred to A.Q. Khan.117 The Pakistanis have since adapted that design for their own arsenal but that is a far from difficult gap to bridge.118 It remains possible that this is all an elaborate bluff to exert pressure on Western efforts to deal with Iran. But there is a prevalent suspicion that, as David Ottaway puts it, “Pakistan has become the kingdom’s nuclear protector, with China’s help”.119
Collaboration between China and Pakistan on an area of such significance and sensitivity as the two sides’ nuclear ties has built an unusual level of mutual trust between them. At the same time, it provides one of the relationship’s enduring sources of imbalance: Pakistan is in China’s debt, and knows it. Not that China’s support was an act of generosity—Beijing continues to extract strategic benefit from the decision—but the collaboration remains considerably less vital to Chinese interests than it is to Pakistan’s, whose autonomy and even survival as a state have been preserved by its nuclear capacity.
Pakistan has repaid the favour when it can, though as much by chance as by design. Stray, unexploded US tomahawk missiles launched at Afghanistan in response to Al Qaeda’s attacks on US embassies in Africa in 1998 found their way from Balochistan into the hands of the Pakistani military, and then into the possession of the Chinese.120 A reverse-engineered cruise missile based on these advanced US models showed up in both countries’ weapons arsenals a couple of years later. The US stealth helicopter that crashed in Abbottabad during the raid on Bin Laden in 2011 was another treasure trove for China to which the Pakistanis were happy to provide them access before it was shipped back to the United States.121 But none of these chance gifts compare to the thirty-year process of Chinese support for the Pakistani nuclear programme.
Over time, nuclear weapons have only become more central to Pakistani military strategy. This is a partly a function of the growing conventional military capabilities gap with India. For many years India had its pick of some of the best Soviet equipment, and now it sits in the enviable position of being able to choose between Russian, European, Israeli and American suppliers, as well as having a far greater resource base with which to make the purchases, and a far more substantial territorial capacity to absorb a nuclear attack. Weapons sales from the United States have ensured that Pakistan can at least stay within touching distance. But they don’t do much more than that. As one US diplomatic cable put it, they “essentially buy time to delay Pakistan considering the nuclear option in a conflict with India. Given India’s overwhelming military superiority, this would only be a few days, but these days would allow critical time to mediate and prevent nuclear conflict.”122 It is only the nuclear weapons themselves that provide any meaning to the notion of strategic balance.
But for Pakistan—unlike China—the bomb has always been seen as an enabling factor rather than just a means of ensuring others’ restraint. The 1965 war was interpreted by some as Pakistan’s last push for Kashmir before the looming prospect of Indian nuclearization made it impossible.123 As their nuclear programme grew in the early 1980s, Pakistani army officers actively debated what new opportunities having strategic weapons of their own would open up in Kashmir—some believing that “a bold Pakistani strike to liberate Kashmir might go unchallenged if Indian leadership was indecisive”.124 The Kargil war was partly an answer: the first time Pakistan had the opportunity to conduct a
military operation in Kashmir under a nuclear umbrella came barely a year after the 1998 test. Since then, a series of terrorist attacks on major targets in India have occurred, without retaliation, albeit with the deniability afforded by state-backed militant groups rather than regular troops. For some Pakistani strategists, it has been a vindication of the notion that nuclear weapons now provide the level of deterrence required to make asymmetric attacks a credible—and relatively cost-free—strategic option.125 “For 15 years this country is bleeding from attack after attack, and there is nothing we can do,” said Raja Mohan of the Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi think tank. “The attacks correlate directly to Pakistan’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. From the moment they got nukes, they saw it as an opportunity they could exploit. And India has no instruments to punish Pakistan or change its behavior.”126
Pakistan has now started to move beyond the principle of minimum deterrence through a significant expansion of its nuclear capabilities.127 This is often justified with reference to India’s Cold Start doctrine, an operational plan devised by the Indian Army in 2004 for a rapid penetration into Pakistani territory that would enable India to enact swift retribution for a Pakistani attack. Described in one US diplomatic cable as “a mixture of myth and reality”, it may never be put to use on the battlefield by India.128 Yet alongside fears about American designs on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, it has been used as a rationale not only for the development of what is a growing nuclear arsenal, which may already exceed India’s, but also for the addition of a new generation of tactical weapons.129 Lieutenant General Khalid Kidwai, who supervised Pakistan’s nuclear assets for nearly fourteen years, has referred to the intent of these short-range weapons being to “pour cold water on Cold Start”.130 As a result, the dangers inherent in another nuclear crisis in South Asia are now considerably greater than they were a few years ago.131 Pakistan now has the means to strike many more Indian targets. It has a growing number of missiles that are vulnerable to misuse—smaller, mated with warheads, and more likely to result in miscalculation, rapid escalation, or even loss of control of individual weapons.132 When coupled with the ambiguity about whether jihadi attacks in India are acts of the Pakistani state itself, rogue actors in the state apparatus, or simply ISI-trained militants operating without state sanction, there is now an acute risk that another Mumbai-style attack could result in war on the subcontinent or an environment in which the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is imperilled. China is uncomfortable with these implications. That has not stopped it from supporting the Pakistani nuclear programme, but it has prompted Beijing to play a growing role in helping to defuse crises on the subcontinent and pushing Pakistan towards lasting ways to stabilize its relationship with India. Beijing may still be a vital enabler for Pakistan but nowadays it is also determined to limit the potential risks.
3
RE-HYPHENATING INDIA
So long as the Indian government oppresses the Kashmiri people, China will not cease to support the Kashmiri people in their struggle for self-determination. So long as the Government of India persists in its unbridled aggression towards Pakistan, China will not cease supporting Pakistan in her just struggle against aggression. This stand of ours will never change, however many helpers you may have such as the U.S., the Modern Revisionists and the U.S.-controlled United Nations.
Chinese note to India, 19651
China and the South Asian countries have a great deal of common ground and converging interests just as all neighbours do. However, as neighbours, it is difficult not to have some differences or disputes from time to time. We stand for seeking common ground on major issues while reserving differences on minor ones. We should look at the differences or disputes from a long perspective, seeking a just and reasonable settlement through consultations and negotiations while bearing in mind the larger picture. If certain issues cannot be resolved for the time being, they may be shelved temporarily so that they will not affect the normal state-to-state relations.
Jiang Zemin, “Carrying Forward Generations of Friendly
and Good-Neighbourly Relations and Endeavouring Towards a
Better Tomorrow for All”, 19962
No country can choose its neighbours, and a distant relative may not be as helpful as a near neighbour. China and India should not seek cooperation from afar with a ready partner at hand.
Li Keqiang, “Seize the new opportunities in India-China Cooperation”, 20133
In December 1996, Jiang Zemin was due to make a state visit to Pakistan. It was a rare event in Sino-Pakistani relations. Although Chinese heads of state had made the trip before, neither of the men who wielded ultimate power in China, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, had ever taken the six-hour flight across the Karakoram mountain range. With Deng, now in the last few months of his life, having fully handed over the reins to Jiang, this would be an unusual opportunity for Pakistan to play host to a Chinese president who could actually call the shots. It would be another decade before they would have the chance again. Jiang had even spent several months living in Pakistan, in 1976, as an engineering consultant at the Heavy Machinery Complex and Heavy Forge and Foundry in Taxila.4 Yet the Pakistanis were viewing the visit with trepidation. Jiang’s arrival in Islamabad looked set to be completely overshadowed by the first leg of the journey: he would be flying in from New Delhi, where he would make the first ever visit to India by a Chinese head of state. This would draw further public attention to a development that was making Pakistan increasingly uncomfortable. Chinese policy in South Asia was steadily taking on what Beijing described as a more “balanced” quality.5
The Sino-Indian relationship had been undergoing a gradual process of normalization, and entered a new phase after Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s breakthrough visit to Beijing in 1988.6 The Soviet Union’s collapse accelerated the transition in Chinese foreign policy away from Cold War rivalries towards a focus on economic goals, whether through outright trade diplomacy, or through the stabilization of China’s regional security environment in order to concentrate on economic development. India no longer occupied the status in Beijing’s eyes of Soviet quasi-ally, and, in addition to its prospects as a trade partner, might even become an asset in China’s growing struggle with the United States. In the year preceding Jiang’s visit, the Taiwan Strait crisis had seen the staging of the greatest display of US military might in East Asia since the Vietnam War, as Washington deployed two carrier battle groups in response to China’s intimidatory missile tests in the vicinity of Taiwan.7 With US-China relations already fundamentally altered by the Tiananmen Square massacre, this was the closest the two sides had come to confrontation since the early 1960s. For China, concepts such as “anti-hegemonism” and “multipolarity” were the order of the day, and major developing world powers such as India were potential supporters.8 An old friend like Pakistan wouldn’t be forgotten, but the relative value of the relationship seemed to be diminishing.
The Pakistanis watched Jiang’s visit to India closely. There was already one worrying sign for them. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman declared on Indian soil that “it is not in the interests of China to sell advanced weapons to its immediate neighbours”.9 This was a promise that Islamabad could probably afford to discount, though: Beijing had regularly made and broken them before, and would indeed do so again. But China had saved the real blow for a speech that Jiang would deliver in Pakistan itself, at the national assembly. The language sounded bland but the message was well understood by the parliamentarians in attendance. The Chinese president failed to mention Kashmir explicitly—a point of sensitivity for the Pakistanis in its own right—but his references to “seeking a just and reasonable settlement through consultations and negotiations” and “shelving” disputes were clear and pointed.10 It undercut Pakistan’s position that Kashmir should be resolved through international mediation, not bilateral negotiations, at precisely the time when Islamabad was on a renewed push to internationalize the dispute.11 Worse, it
seemed to reflect a willingness on China’s part to shift its stance on an issue of deep significance to Pakistan for the sake of better relations with India. The passage of the speech was received in “pindrop silence” according to the US ambassador, Thomas Simons.12 It is still cited today by Pakistanis as a warning sign for what might happen if the attractions of warmer ties with the old enemy grow too great for Beijing to resist.13