by Andrew Small
The same was true of the Pakistani government and intelligence services. Relations with the Kashmiri groups that operated under the ISI’s direct patronage were still intact, along with a spectrum of groups in the Afghan insurgency, but in the aftermath of the Red Mosque siege they had entered a state of open warfare with other militant groups. Even formerly trusted ISI intermediaries such as Colonel Imam, a founder of the Taliban, or Khalid Khawaja, another intelligence liaison between the military and the militants, were not safe—both men were killed in North Waziristan by the TTP, despite the direct pleas from Mullah Omar and Sirajuddin Haqqani that Baitullah Mehsud, the TTP leader, spare Colonel Imam’s life.172 Inevitably, as the Pakistani state’s relationship with various militant organizations has fractured, its capacity to persuade them to steer clear of the Uighurs’ cause has diminished. As the next chapter explains, these groups have been willing to make a specific target of China—especially its economic activities in Pakistan—if it helps to exert pressure on the Pakistani government. They have certainly not been deterred from affording protection to Uighur militants.
Few of the Uighurs in Pakistan have any connection to militancy. The bulk of the Uighur community, numbering a couple of thousand, is in Rawalpindi, and operates under the close watch of the Chinese government. Particularly since 9/11, the Chinese embassy in Islamabad has maintained a strong interest in them, extending benefits such as funding for scholarships and school fees, collecting precise information about the numbers and locations of Uighurs in Pakistan, and establishing an “ex-Chinese association”173 to manage its contacts.174 But while this community has its own political divisions over relations with the Chinese government, they are carefully monitored, and are largely naturalized in Pakistan anyway. The real concern is with the tiny group of people in Waziristan seeking to launch attacks in China.
Uighur militants in Pakistan may only number in the tens—Chinese officials in Pakistan have talked about estimates of between forty and eighty people.175 Unlike the Afghan Taliban, whose roots and relationships in the tribal areas of Pakistan were extensive, when ETIM militants fled after the US invasion of Afghanistan they were in a position of near-complete dependency. ETIM members are virtually wholly reliant on the IMU for their shelter and supplies, and the IMU in turn needs local militant commanders to provide their blessing and protection. Initially this was in the Wana region of South Waziristan, but after tensions with one of the Waziri tribal leaders, Maulvi Nazir, they were expelled in 2007176 and forced to set up in North Waziristan instead, under the protection of the Pakistani Taliban leader, Beitullah Mehsud.177 Doubts about their capacity to launch attacks, and their autonomy to decide to do so even if they were able to, are pervasive among terrorism experts in Pakistan and China. “A single spark can start a prairie fire” was the justification given by one Chinese expert—quoting Mao—of the relentless focus on such a small, depleted band.178 But there was little suggestion that they are currently an active threat.
Beijing has nonetheless leaned hard on Pakistan to deal with the handful that remain. A retired Pakistani general described the 2008–09 period as “the most difficult period in the [Sino-Pakistani] relationship that I can remember” owing to China’s constant pressure on the Uighur issue, first in the run-up to the Olympics and then over a perceived threat to China’s National Day celebrations.179 The issue for China goes beyond the capacity of the militants themselves. ETIM’s very weakness poses the standing question: why can’t or won’t the Pakistani army just wipe them out?
The issue has become perhaps the greatest sore point in the China-Pakistan relationship. Some on the Chinese side are understanding of the Pakistani government’s explanation—that operations in North Waziristan are too difficult to undertake but that they are genuinely doing all they can apart from a full-scale military intervention in the tribal areas. Others are simply cynical, suggesting that if the army dealt with the threat too comprehensively it would make Pakistan less useful to China, giving the Pakistani government reason to allow a manageable, small-scale ETIM presence to persist.180 But a more disturbing explanation is also advanced: that religious sympathies may be superseding Islamabad’s commitment to the bilateral relationship, and even endangering the secular-strategic rationale that underpins it. “We see it in their eyes when we’re sitting in the meetings. They’re not comfortable with what we’re asking,” claimed a Chinese expert who is close to the PLA.181 “When we provide them with intelligence on ETIM locations they give warnings before launching their attacks,” noted another, in a complaint that would be familiar to Western officials.182 China has even received evidence of ISI agents visiting ETIM training camps.183 “We certainly think there’s a strong chance that they have contacts and relationships with ETIM and the Uzbeks,” said another Chinese analyst.184 Accusations of Pakistani support for militants in Xinjiang go back a long way too. In 1990, when the Chinese arrested two Pakistani nationals in Xinjiang for inciting unrest, they were infuriated to learn that the two men were ISI operatives—“former operatives”, they were quickly assured.185
Fairly or not, Pakistan’s approach to the Uighur issue has become the totemic example for those on the Chinese side who have started to raise broader concerns about the creeping “Islamisation” of the Pakistani army. It is one thing for China to provide comprehensive military assistance to an avowedly India-centric army, but quite another if elements in that army have goals that extend beyond the logic of balancing and deterrence towards the demands of jihad. “We’re not worried about the generals, we’re worried about the brigadiers,” argued one Chinese expert. “The generals were already old enough for their habits to be set by the time Zia came in. They drink. They send their children to study in the United States or Great Britain. The younger ones are sending their children to study in the Gulf.”
For China it risks becoming a losing proposition either way. A Pakistani military that grows ever more closely enmeshed with an Islamist and militant agenda undermines China’s basic strategic goals in South Asia. A Pakistani military that can no longer keep China off the terrorist target list, that has even become a target in its own right, undermines China’s security at home and the safety of its projects and personnel abroad. And it is the latter threat that has posed the biggest problems for the weakest pillar of the China-Pakistan relationship—the economy.
5
THE TRADE ACROSS THE ROOF OF THE WORLD
It was well past midnight when suddenly Prime Minister Chou En-Lai walked into the guesthouse without any protocol, saying he had come for a private talk with an old friend. During the meeting I asked him what was his thinking about the Middle East, especially the Chinese trade with these countries…I pointed out that most of China’s trade was through the port of Shanghai which was far off from these countries. The nearest outlet for China’s trade with the Gulf was Karachi, not Shanghai, if you see the map. I explained to him that there was an ancient trade route but lost to modern times, not only for trade but for strategic purposes as well.
Ghulam Faruque, Pakistani Commerce Minister1
No matter how hard they try to turn Gwadar into Dubai, it won’t work. There will be resistance. The future pipelines going to China will not be safe. The pipelines will have to cross our Baluch territory, and if our rights are violated, nothing will be secure.
Nisar Baluch, General Secretary, Baluch Welfare Society2
Investors are like pigeons, when a government frightens them with poor decisions they all fly off together.
Zhu Rongji to General Musharraf, 20013
At the peak of the Cultural Revolution, in August 1968, the Pakistani Foreign Minister, Mian Arshad Hussain, arrived in Beijing bearing a gift for Mao Zedong—a basket containing Pakistan’s national fruit, roughly four dozen mangoes. Mao himself was not fond of mangoes, but he had another purpose in mind for them. The fruits were divided up by his head of security, Wang Dongxing, and presented to the Capital Worker-Peasant Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams.4 Mao ha
d directed military chief Lin Biao to establish these army-led units in order to suppress the activities of the Red Guards, but discerning which of the competing centres of power Mao favoured at the time was not always straightforward. The propaganda team sent into Qinghua University had seen five of their number killed and hundreds wounded in their first foray against the bottle-and-grenade-wielding students, who didn’t yet know that they had lost Mao’s support.5 The delivery of the Pakistani mangoes on 5 August was therefore a portentous moment. It is claimed by the People’s Daily that the workers responded rhapsodically: “These are not simple mangoes, they are the rain and dew; they are the sunshine.”6 With the fruit came definitive evidence of Mao’s personal blessing for their efforts to subdue the warring student factions. It signalled the end of the Red Guards’ violent and chaotic role in the Cultural Revolution. Over the next year the PLA fully took over the process of winding down the excesses of the student vanguard’s activities, and millions of youths, including a 17-year-old Xi Jinping, were sent down to the countryside for “re-education”. China as a whole was swept up in “mango fever”. Replicas of the fruit were made in the name of the Beijing Municipal Revolutionary Committee and sent around the country.7 Badges and posters were created displaying workers bearing the mango platter. A factory in Henan started producing a line of “Golden Mango” brand cigarettes, which continues to this day.8 Attempts to preserve the original fruits were made, not altogether successfully. The arrival of replicas in Chengdu was greeted by half a million people.9
When Pakistan next found itself at the centre of a Chinese mango fever, it would be in the belly of one of modern capitalism’s most powerful forces: Walmart. A sample of Pakistani mangoes shipped in July 2012 had earned “overwhelming success” in the Chinese stores of the behemoth from Bentonville.10 The first 40-ton container delivery arrived from Karachi the following month, with a similar amount due to follow every week for the duration of the season. “Pakistan’s mangoes have become a centre of attraction in the largest retail chain of China…where the king of fruit is being offered for sale,” announced Durrani Associates, a major Pakistani fruit exporter, “China can be the biggest market of Pakistani mangoes and within three years exports can be doubled.”11 One article in the Pakistani press breathlessly related that this would add “millions” to Pakistan’s balance of payments, after “years of struggle” to break into the Chinese market.12 There was a hitch, though. Elsewhere in Asia, a rising low-cost competitor was hitting Pakistan’s superior but pricey fruit exports. “We have lost the Asian markets slowly and gradually due to the strong hold of Chinese mangoes,” lamented the CEO of one of Pakistan’s other leading fruit exporters, Harvest Tradings. “Every year we find new markets theoretically but practically, due to the lack of required infrastructure and strict conditions of other nations on exports of the fruit, we haven’t been able to tap those markets.”13
Like so many economic interactions between China and Pakistan, this one was destined to end in disappointment. A few months after the Walmart story appeared, Pakistan announced that it had missed its mango export target for the year, owing partly to competition from China, its all-weather friend.14 The story was the same the previous year and it would be the same again in 2013. The shipments to China itself never picked up, either. Logistical problems and phytosanitary requirements were the ostensible factors conspiring to deny Chinese consumers the larger, sweeter Pakistani mangoes.15 But the inability of the two sides to achieve a breakthrough on the export of Pakistan’s national fruit was symbolic of a deeper set of problems.
China’s transformation from an autarkic communist backwater into the world’s second largest economy should have been a tremendous opportunity for Pakistan. At the time of Mao’s mangoes, Pakistan’s GDP per capita was ahead of China’s, and the country was dubbed a “model developing country” by Harvard’s Development Advisory Service, while China under the Cultural Revolution was in economic reverse.16 But by 2012 the average Chinese earned five times as much as the average Pakistani, and China’s economy was 35 times the size of Pakistan’s. Close political and security ties alone were never going to be a guarantee of close commercial ones, but in certain aspects they might have been expected to smooth the way, whether it came to market access or tapping the vast new streams of Chinese financing and investment. Yet for a long time the story of the economic relationship between the two sides has been one of excitable headlines touting large numbers, ports, pipelines, and energy transit routes followed by frustration, disappointment, stalled projects, and much smaller figures buried away in statistical reports. Commercial ties are expanding—bilateral trade reached $12 billion in 2012—but continue to fall well short of expectations, and look even worse in comparative context. Sino-Indian trade, at $66 billion in 2012, is more than five times larger than China’s trade with Pakistan, and the total volume of trade between China and Pakistan from 1995 to 2007, at $20 billion, was barely half of the Sino-Indian annual trade volume in 2007 alone.17 If this can partly be explained away by India’s sheer scale, telling comparisons can be made with a couple of China’s smaller neighbours. The Philippines, which is roughly the same economic size as Pakistan, trades at three times its level with China. Vietnam, an economy half the size of Pakistan’s, has four times the amount of bilateral trade with the Chinese.18 Moreover, 75% of Sino-Pakistani trade is composed of Pakistani imports of Chinese goods, with only a few billion dollars’ worth heading in the opposite direction. It was only in 2011 that China even broke into the top five destinations for Pakistani exports, at a level still substantially below the EU and the United States.19
The story for investment has been as disappointing as for trade. While grand announcements are made virtually every week about another new influx of Chinese money, the hard numbers have rarely borne them out. Even in the good years for Pakistan, the period between 2000 and 2005 when overall FDI increased by 600%, the investment flow from China only crept up in tiny increments. It amounted to barely $400,000 in 2004/5.20 A surge in 2006/7, the single period in the last decade when China made the official list of the top three investors in Pakistan, was followed by outflows of Chinese investment in subsequent years.21 While these figures from Pakistan’s state bank almost certainly don’t capture everything, in 2013, informal estimates by Pakistani experts for total Chinese investment in the country still run only between $5 billion and $7 billion.22 And when it comes to handing out hard cash, Pakistan has received short shrift. Islamabad’s requests for direct grants from Beijing, of the sort that the United States provides, have elicited the response that this was “unbecoming” for relations among friends.23 In an interview with Pakistani reporters, Zhou Enlai had criticized US economic aid to Pakistan as a form of neo-colonialism.24
When the Zardari government looked to China to provide it with a multi-billion dollar soft loan to help it through the financial crisis in 2008, it was rebuffed.25 The gap between the enormous figures publicized during bilateral visits and the support that is actually delivered is stark: a RAND study puts the total level of financial assistance pledged from China to Pakistan between 2001 and 2011 at $66 billion, but finds that only 6% of it ever came through.26 One leading Chinese expert pithily summarizes the economic section of his essay on Sino-Pakistani relations with the heading: “China-Pakistan Economic Ties: Tiny and Weak”.27
In the context of the broader Sino-Pakistani relationship, the weakness of economic ties has long been seen as a problem by both sides. As Ye Hailin puts it: “The objective has not been to strengthen the two countries’ welfare interests but to strengthen them against common threats. It should be described as a shield to protect their traditional security interests rather than a bridge to lead to common prosperity and wealth.”28 The relationship is often described as a stool with two legs, and there have been fears that the absence of a solid economic foundation risks destabilizing the whole edifice. Even before Deng Xiaoping’s reforms took off in the 1980s, there were attempts to remedy the imb
alance. 13% of China’s overseas assistance before 1979 went to Pakistan, with the bulk of it tied to purchases from Chinese companies.29 But it was in the 1990s that the risk really started to look acute. China, focused on sustaining its rapid growth rates, started improving ties with India, which had embarked on a dramatic economic reform process of its own after 1991. The attractions of the booming Indian economy for China have since become a standing admonition and threat to Pakistanis: while the serious business is being transacted with their larger neighbour, Pakistan could end up being written off by Beijing as too plagued with violence, and too willing to put security obsessions over economic needs, to play a mature role in China’s long-term regional plans. If this is partly a geopolitical anxiety, the more basic fear is that Pakistan might simply fail to take advantage of a once-in-a-generation chance to use China’s economic take-off to fuel its own.30