The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics

by Andrew Small

  The evidence instead pointed to militants affiliated with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s organization, Hezb-e-Islami. Hekmatyar had once been Pakistan’s favourite son among the mujahideen, but his inability to build a national following in the 1990s saw him thrown overboard by his sponsors in favour of the Taliban, who were seen as better able to consolidate power in Afghanistan.161 Hekmatyar fled to Iran for several years, was expelled in 2002, and returned to Pakistan in an effort to work himself into a position of power in the new insurgency.162 Whatever his motives, being tied to the killing of Chinese workers would not be helpful to him as he sought to get himself into the ISI’s good graces again. Hezb-e-Islami had even established direct contact with the Chinese soon after Hekmatyar’s return from Iran—during which time he “made concerted efforts to placate China, as well as to urge the Muslim leaders in Xinjiang to stop their separatist agitation”.163 In an interview conducted with him a couple of months after the killings, he denied involvement in the incident. The journalist, however, would not let him off the hook:

  Question: Are you behind the recent killing of the Chinese?

  [Hekmatyar:] I have no idea about it. The Taliban have split now. The other faction is led by Mullah Soban. It could be his brainchild. I have expelled some miscreants from my party. It could be their handiwork. I really have no idea.

  Question: But the Afghan government strongly suspects that you have masterminded it. They have good reasons to believe this. In fact, you have admitted it off-the-record while talking to some journalists…

  [Hekmatyar:] It is not true. I cannot accept the responsibility if some miscreants have masterminded it at the U.S.’ behest. I believe it is the handiwork of the Americans. They have used some greedy mujahideens for this inhuman act to defame the true mujahideens. I suspect that the Americans have also masterminded the killing of Chinese in Gwador, Baluchistan. The U.S. agenda is to malign jehad and jehadis.164

  The lesson for China was that even with all of its political ducks seemingly in a row, its projects would still be exposed to serious security threats. Whether as a result of individual grievances, divisions within militant organizations, or simply commanders with their own agenda, investment in an all-out war zone carried high risks. Ultimately, Beijing’s relations with the Quetta Shura and the ISI could not provide a definitive guarantee against attacks. And nowhere would this be clearer than in China’s biggest investment.

  Following the Aynak deal’s grand announcement in 2007, the most striking fact about the copper mine project was how little then happened. It started slowly as both sides appeared to make painful progress even with basic paperwork.165 As the project crawled forward and the scheduled date for the copper’s extraction moved further and further back, the question of the reasons for the delay grew more and more acute. Some members of the Afghan government raised the prospect of throwing the Chinese companies off the project and reopening the bids.166 Other accounts suggested that Chinese money was helping to ensure that officials in the ministry of mines didn’t complain too much.167 But the Chinese companies involved had a long list of grievances of their own. In public, there were a couple of excuses they could point to that were less sensitive. Ostensibly the discovery of a major archaeological site—Mes Aynak—was the main cause of the hold-up.168 But this was not sufficient reason for the lack of progress on other infrastructure that was nowhere near the dig. “We’re just useful idiots for the MCC,” said one French archaeologist working on the project.169 Security problems were another reason cited. Yet while Logar was certainly insurgent territory, the group operating in the province was the Haqqani network, the militants tied most closely to the Pakistani government—once described by the top US military officer, Admiral Mullen, as a “veritable arm of the ISI”.170 If they had wanted to stage a major attack on the facility, they could have done so. They had been responsible for some of the most spectacular militant operations in Afghanistan in recent years,171 and it is unlikely that the ANA’s protection force at the mine and a few decommissioned Chinese People’s Armed Police who were based inside the facility would have been enough to stop them.172 Instead, whether they did so of their own volition or with Pakistan’s guidance, the Haqqanis kept well away from targeting the mine.

  There were still security issues in the environment of the mine but, at least initially, the handful of stray rockets didn’t seem to go beyond the risks that MCC could reasonably have anticipated for an investment in such a location. Researchers from organizations such as Integrity Watch Afghanistan conducting interviews around the mine had a strong sense that they were not centrally directed insurgent attacks, but rather stemmed from local grievances that the national and regional government had still not addressed.173 Land claims from the surrounding villages remained unresolved, despite the Afghan government’s pledge to do so. Other issues piled up too—the lack of skilled workers, corruption among Afghan officials, and the unfeasibly high costs of the proposed railway project.174 And a vicious cycle was developing—the number of attacks in the vicinity of the mine was rising, MCC was growing increasingly nervous about its investment and withdrawing workers from the project, and the local people were growing less and less happy about the slow progress of an investment that was supposed to yield significant economic benefits for them.175

  Political motives were also read into the delay—some officials in Kabul suggested that, while the Chinese company had the foothold it needed, it lacked any rationale for moving expeditiously with the project.176 The main beneficiaries of royalty payments would be the current Afghan government, which might not survive, and the NATO coalition, which wanted economic projects like this one to succeed quickly. The fact that US officials were urging China to move forward with the investment was an a priori reason for a major state-owned company not to do so. At the very least, there was a strong case for waiting to see how the political and security situation in the country developed.

  MCC was going through its own difficulties too: the company reported a loss of over a billion US dollars in 2012, with cost overruns, delays and the plummeting cost of iron ore hitting the company.177 By the end of the year, only a skeleton crew was left at the mine, and the Afghan government was struggling to persuade MCC to move ahead with operations. “We had meetings with them (the Chinese investors) and assured them these rocket attacks happen anywhere and they are not the direct targets. We had repeatedly meetings with them but could not make them confident,” said Sardar Mohammad Sultani, the Deputy Interior Minister. “The timing of those workers returning to Afghanistan will depend on conditions,” said an MCC spokesman.178

  Even in a supposedly less complicated part of the country, China still found itself running into problems. For several years after the Aynak deal, there was virtually no Chinese economic activity in Afghanistan, as if China Inc. was collectively reserving judgement over the future of the country. Then, in December 2011, came the announcement that China National Petroleum Corporation, the largest Chinese oil and gas producer, had won the bidding process for Afghanistan’s first major oil contract.179 It did so with a local partner that seemed to have every political base covered, and a commercial relationship with China that went back a surprisingly long way. Watan Group had achieved a level of notoriety after being blacklisted by the US government following its controversial handling of a security contract for the Kandahar-Kabul road, a vital logistics route for coalition convoys.180 A US Congressional report exposing Watan’s payments to Taliban commanders followed press reports that as much as 10% of the $360 million contract may have been handed out as protection money to the insurgency.181 The episode cast a spotlight on the two men who ran Watan, Rashid Popal and his brother Ahmed Rateb Popal.

  Rateb Popal had last been in the public eye immediately before the invasion of Afghanistan, during the final, chaotic press conference held by the Taliban’s ambassador in Pakistan. Interpreting for the ambassador was a distinctive figure—a six-foot tall man with a black turban, big beard, eye-patch, damage
d hand and prosthetic arm, who spoke with a New York accent.182 Born into a prominent Pashtun family, Popal had studied at Queens College, Flushing (New York), and had picked up his injuries while still a schoolboy in Kabul during the Soviet invasion. The bomb that blew up in his hands had been intended for the Russian embassy.183 After spending ten years in prison in the United States on heroin-smuggling charges, he returned to Taliban-run Afghanistan in 1998 seeking business opportunities. One of his first ventures was a steel factory, which he established with help from an outside source—China.184 Over the next few years, he would live between Pakistan and Afghanistan, acting as a broker for business deals between the Taliban and the Chinese, who provided one of the few commercial avenues available at the time.185 After the US invasion, however, his importance to China’s interests in Afghanistan grew considerably: Popal was a cousin of the new Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, and members of the Karzai family were believed to be major shareholders in Popal’s company.186 He was known to receive a lavishly generous level of hospitality in Beijing.187 Watan Group went into business with a couple of Chinese partners, working with Huawei to install digital networking equipment in government ministries and establishing Sino-Afghan Steel, the realization of Popal’s original joint venture of the late 1990s.188 But the CNPC deal was on a more serious scale.

  In comparative terms, the investment itself was relatively small—there are believed to be only 87 million barrels at the Amu Darya field—and the terms, as with Aynak, were generous for the Afghan government: 15% royalties and 50–70% of the profits, as well as a promise to build the country’s first refinery.189 In theory though, it positioned CNPC well to win larger future tenders, and to connect its Afghanistan oilfields with the company’s growing energy infrastructure in Central Asia.190 Yet again, however, the project would be dogged with problems. The three oil blocks were in the northern province of Sar-e-Pol, up towards Afghanistan’s Central Asian borders, far from any serious insurgent threat, in territory controlled by the Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum. Dostum was not happy about his cut. He had played a crucial role in Karzai’s presidential re-election campaign—returning to the country to help swing a major voting block behind him191—and had long treated this part of the country as a personal fiefdom. Just as Karzai was due to visit China for the SCO summit in June 2012, press stories appeared about men loyal to Dostum intimidating Chinese engineers and demanding a share in the proceeds.192 Posters of Dostum were hung around villages and towns near the Sar-e-Pol site. The Afghan national security council accused him of “undermining the national interest” and threatened to arrest him.193 Dostum retorted that “China is a trustworthy friend of Afghanistan. It has made the largest investment in the mineral resources of the country. I do not have any problem in that regard. However, I rightfully demand for the rights of the people of the Sar e Pul and Jawzjan, who have to be considered as a top priority as far as the selection of the workforce is concerned.”194 It was a poor omen. The problem was fixed, and the field started pumping oil within a few months, but in the eyes of Chinese diplomats it was the second occasion on which the Afghan government had failed to get the local politics squared. And a year later the project had stalled again, with drilling halted and most of the Chinese workers sent home, this time supposedly owing to a dispute over transit arrangements with Uzbekistan.195 In practice though, the more serious disagreement was between CNPC and Popal’s Watan Group over lucrative subcontracts.196

  The stuttering progress of the oil project yet again cast a pall over the willingness of investors, Chinese or otherwise, to take a risk on Afghanistan. This was supposed to be the simple, successful project in a peaceful part of the country that should have been more akin to a venture in Central Asia than in the insurgency-racked regions in the East and South. When the Afghan government launched another oil tender in September 2013, it found “no important takers”.197 Aynak itself appeared to be close to unravelling completely. In 2013, MCC’s proposed renegotiation of the terms of the contract would absolve it of almost all the major infrastructure commitments that had made the deal so attractive to the Afghan government in the first place, and push back the proposed start date for mining to 2019.198 The ripple effects were significant. The other major investment in Afghanistan, the Hajigak iron ore mine, which was run by an Indian company, had been premised on the delivery of much of that same infrastructure—without it, that company too wanted a renegotiation of terms.199 Hamid Karzai flew to Beijing in September 2013 seeking a deal. The Afghan government had been split. One side proposed simply throwing the Chinese off the project altogether. The case against doing so was not commercial, it was political: “Others for strategic reasons want [renegotiation of the contract] to happen … so China remains committed to helping Afghanistan when the money dries up in this country.”200

  This was not just a hopeful punt on the part of the Afghan officials. Even as China’s economic engagement with Afghanistan was stalling, its diplomatic engagement was increasing exponentially. For years, Chinese diplomats were known for turning up to the array of international jamborees on Afghanistan’s future, reading out their talking points, and then playing virtually no role at all in the remainder of the proceedings.201 Bilateral relations were amicable but distant—Afghanistan’s top leadership would troop off to China from time to time but there were no reciprocal visits of any comparable seniority. Then, in 2011, everything started to change. Not only did Chinese officials suddenly appear to care about the agreements that were being reached in major international gatherings202 in Istanbul and Bonn, they were willing to disagree openly with Pakistan—the Holy Grail, from Afghanistan’s perspective, given China’s influence over its friend.203 The shift in behaviour was stark: “Before, you would attend meetings on Afghanistan and the neighbours would be silent, and here you have them taking a lead,” said one of the diplomats in attendance at the Istanbul summit, in an interview with Reuters. “The Chinese for the first time were very comprehensive and constructive, you could really see an elevated role of China in the region and more outspoken than ever before.”204 Another official states, “They were very vocal and raised several issues during the drafting. We weren’t even allowed to begin the final version until the Chinese delegation had arrived.”205 China was also convening a flurry of meetings of its own, with bilateral and trilateral get-togethers with Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia and whatever other configuration looked like it might be useful,206 even conspicuously including India.207 Its meetings with the Taliban intensified, taking place in Pakistan and even in China itself, and the contents of these exchanges started being relayed to other countries rather than being kept closely held between Beijing and Islamabad.208 Afghanistan also received the first visitor from the Chinese politburo standing committee in several decades, Zhou Yongkang, the security chief.209 For observers who were used to a Chinese political approach in Afghanistan that prioritized avoiding attention, there was suddenly a lot that stood in need of explanation. Some analysis of Zhou’s visit, for instance, pointed to his former role at CNPC and his reputation as chief of China’s oil lobby to suggest that resources were the motivation for his surprise trip. It was nothing of the sort. “We don’t really have economic interests in Afghanistan right now,” argued one Chinese analyst. “None of the projects are moving. There’s only one concern there: security.”210

  China was paying serious attention to it again, and the catalyst for the surprising acceleration in Chinese activity was an increasingly ominous date: 2014.211 The Americans were leaving.

  7

  LORD, MAKE THEM LEAVE—BUT NOT YET

  Personally, I must have said on no less than ten occasions to my American friends that the United States should aid Pakistan.

  Deng Xiaoping, 19791

  Our friend is in trouble and we need to provide as much help as possible.

  Yang Jiechi to Richard Holbrooke, 20092

  When President Obama spoke to President Xi he said ‘We are not Afghanistan’s neighbours, y
ou are neighbours. You should be ready’. Now we are ready.

  Chinese official, 20143

  On Friday 24 August 2012, two US Hellfire missiles struck a militant training camp in the Shawal valley, near the border of North and South Waziristan. The target of the drone strikes was Abdul Shakoor Turkistani, the chief of Al Qaeda’s forces in FATA, who was killed along with three of his commanders. Turkistani had been appointed as Al Qaeda’s leader in the tribal areas in April 2011, a few weeks before Osama Bin Laden’s death. A jihadi newsletter claimed that he was “supervising training camps”, as well as preparing militants for attacks in Europe and the United States.4 He was known to be a member of Al Qaeda’s executive council, the majlis shura. His position on the US targeting list, therefore, was hardly controversial. But he had another identity too. Abdul Shakoor—or Emeti Yakuf, one of his other commonly used pseudonyms—was the head of the Turkistan Islamic Party, the Uighur militant group still known to Beijing as the East Turkistan Islamic Movement.5 Yakuf was one of those believed to have been responsible for the propaganda videos threatening attacks on the Beijing Olympics in 2008.6 One of the European attacks he appeared to have been plotting was an attack on the Chinese embassy in Norway.7 When China had issued an eight-man “most wanted” list of terrorists in 2008, he was the second person named, and on 15 February 2010 he took over the job of the man who occupied the number one slot.8

  His predecessor had suffered exactly the same fate. In May 2010, Abdul Haq al Turkistani, ETIM’s previous leader, was also killed in a US Predator air strike, on a compound in the village of Zor Babar Aidak, near Mir Ali in North Waziristan.9 Abdul Haq had been the figure most closely involved in ETIM’s deepening relationships with other militant groups in the border region, and was an influential enough leader to represent Al Qaeda in its dealings with insurgent forces in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. A few months earlier, he had been seen at a meeting with Baitullah Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban chief, and several senior commanders of the Afghan Taliban.10 The deaths of these two leading figures—and two others on the eight-man list who also lost their lives—would be a serious blow for ETIM and a major victory for the Chinese government. And US drone strikes were not just decimating ETIM’s leadership, they were also responsible for the deaths of some of its most important supporters. In July 2012, six Uzbeks belonging to an IMU splinter organization that was close to ETIM were killed in a strike.11 In June 2012, the top Al Qaeda ideologue who had called for a jihad against China—Abu Yahya al-Libi—was the victim of four missiles fired at another North Waziristan compound.12 Thirteen Uighurs and two Turks, all of them confirmed by ETIM as its members, were killed in Afghanistan’s Baghdis province in another Predator strike a few weeks before Abdul Haq, a major loss for a group that may only number in the tens.13