Pakistan
can’t afford China’s Friendship, by C Christine Fair
JULY 3, 2017
Pakistan's elites
think Chinese cash can save the country. They're wrong.
In recent
months, the Chinese-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has left Pakistanis
emboldened, Indians angry, and U.S. analysts worried. Ostensibly, CPEC will
connect Pakistan to China’s western Xinjiang province through the development
of vast new transportation and energy infrastructure. The project is part of
China’s much-hyped Belt and Road Initiative, a grand, increasingly vague
geopolitical plan bridging Eurasia that China’s powerful President Xi Jinping
has promoted heavily.
Pakistani and Chinese officials boast
that CPEC will help address Pakistan’s electricity generation problem, bolster
its road and rail networks, and shore up the economy through the construction
of special economic zones. But these benefits are highly unlikely to
materialize. The project is more inclined to leave Pakistan burdened with
unserviceable debt while further exposing the fissures in its internal
security.
Pakistan
and China often speak of their “all-weather friendship,” but the truth is that
the relationship has always been a cynical one.
Pakistan and China often speak
of their “all-weather friendship,” but the truth is that the relationship has
always been a cynical one. China cultivated Pakistan as a
client through the provision of military assistance; diplomatic
and political cover in the U.N. Security Council; and generous loan aid in an
effort to counter both American influence and the system of anti-Communist
Western treaty alliances. China also sought to embolden Pakistan
to harangue India, but not to the point of war because that would expose the
hard limits of Chinese support. Despite Pakistan’s boasts of iron-clad Chinese
support, when Pakistan went to war with India in 1965, 1971, and 1999, China
did little or nothing to bail out its client in distress.
During the 1971 war, when India intervened in Pakistan’s civil war
in its Bengali-dominated eastern wing, President Richard Nixon requested China move
troops along its eastern border with India to intimidate India and stave off
Pakistan’s defeat. However, China declined to undertake even this modest effort
to preclude India from vivisecting Pakistan. East Pakistan became independent
Bangladesh in 1971. In a nod to Pakistan, China refused to recognize Bangladesh
until August 1975, even after
Pakistan did so in February 1974.
There’s little reason to think China has made a sudden conversion
to altruism when it comes to CPEC. The project originated in 2013, when the
Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, and
Pakistan’s then-president, Asif Ali Zardari, agreed to build an economic
corridor between the two countries. The project inched closer to fruition
in 2014, when Pakistan’s President Mamnoon Hussain and Prime Minister
Nawaz Sharif traveled to China on different occasions to further discussions.
In November 2014, the Chinese government announced that it would finance $46 billion in
energy and infrastructure projects in Pakistan as part of CPEC. In September
2016, China announced a new loan deal for CPEC valued at $51.6 billion. In November 2016,
part of CPEC became “operational” when products were moved by truck from
China and loaded onto ships at Pakistan’s port Gwador along the Makran
coast for markets in West Asia and Africa. After this major
development, China declared that it would increase its investment again
to $62 billion in
April.
Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership alike have told the
public that CPEC will solve Pakistan’s chronic electricity shortages, improve
an aging road and rail infrastructure, provide a fillip to Pakistan’s economy,
knit an increasingly pariah state to a new Chinese-led geopolitical order, and
diminish the role of the much-reviled United States in the region. CPEC has the
bonus of irritating the Indians because it strengthens Pakistan’s hold on
territory in Jammu and Kashmir that it snatched in the 1947-48 war as well as
portions of that territory that Pakistan subsequently ceded to China in 1963 as
a part of the Sino-Pakistan boundary agreement. India claims these lands,
currently held by Pakistan and China, and deems their occupation illegal.
Despite the bold claims made by China and Pakistan, there are many
reasons to be dubious about the purported promises of CPEC. There’s already
violence all along the corridor. The north-most part of CPEC is the Karakoram
Highway (KKH), which gashes through the Karakoram Mountain Range to connect
Kashgar in Xinjiang with Pakistan’s troubled province of Gilgit-Baltistan.
Xinjiang is in the throes of a slow-burning insurgency by the Muslim Uighur
minority against the Communist state. Gilgit-Baltistan, a Shiite-majority
polity under the thumb of a Sunni-dominated Pakistan, is part of the
above-noted contested territory of Jammu-Kashmir. Here, geology and weather
further limit CPEC. The Karakoram Highway, a narrow road weaving through
perilous mountains, can’t bear heavy traffic. Expanding the KKH will not be
easy. Residents of Gilgit-Baltistan worry about the environmental costs in
relation to the few benefits they will enjoy. There have been episodic protests, which
the Pakistani government has ruthlessly put down.
Meanwhile, Gwador is experiencing a prolonged drought, frustrating the project
while the four extant desalination plants remain idle.
In the south, CPEC is anchored to the port at Gwador in
Pakistan’s insurgency-riven Balochistan province. The
local Baloch people deeply resent the
plan because it will fundamentally change the demography of the
area. Before the expansion of Gwadar, the population of the
area was 70,000. If the project comes
to full fruition the population would be closer to 2 million — most of whom
would be non-Baloch. Many poor Baloch have already been displaced from the
area. Since construction has begun, there have been numerous attacks against
Chinese personnel, among other workers.
There’s also the stubborn problem of economic competitiveness. For
CPEC to be more competitive than the North-South Corridor that is rooted
to the Iranian port of Chabahar, Gwador needs to offer a safer and
shorter route from the Arabian Sea to Central Asia. For that to happen, Gwador
needs to be connected by road to the Afghan Ring Road in Afghanistan’s Kandahar
province, which is under sustained attacks by the Afghan Taliban.
Alternatively, a new route could connect Gwador with the border
crossing at Torkham (near Peshawar) by traveling up Balochistan, with its own
active ethnic insurgency, through or adjacent to Pakistan’s Federally
Administered Tribal Areas, which is the epicenter of Islamist terrorism and
insurgency throughout Pakistan. It takes great faith — or idiocy, or greed, or
all of the above — to believe that this is possible.
All of these issues raise salient questions about the real utility
of this unfolding fiasco. If CPEC is not an economically viable route for
actual commerce, what purpose does it serve? Analyst Andrew Small, among
others, has argued that
CPEC is, in reality, a redundant supply route for China should it face an
embargo during a military conflict. It’s also possible that if the port at
Gwador is not economically sustainable the real goal is the creation of a
Chinese naval outpost. Many in India, Pakistan’s historic rival, have also come
to this conclusion. They may well be correct, according to recent Chinese
reports indicating that
China may “expand its marine corps and may station new marine brigades in
Gwadar.”
While the benefits to transit may be illusory, it is possible that
Pakistan could benefit from purportedly low-hanging fruit, including the
much-lauded economic zones and power plants. Pakistan does struggle with power
shortages. But its problem is not a lack of supply, rather the complex issue of
“circular debt” referring
to the accumulating unpaid bills of the power sector; the theft of power
through illegal connections, meter tampering, and other means; and an
inadequate transmission system. Meanwhile, Pakistanis have learned that
the current Chinese development model will do little for
their economy. China prefers to use its own companies and employees rather than
hire locally.
Pakistani citizens also have no way to know what CPEC will cost
them. Neither government has been clear about what projects are part of the
plan. Costing has been completely opaque. China sets the price, contracts the
work out to Chinese companies, and saddles Pakistan with the loans. Given the
ongoing security threats on Chinese nationals in Pakistan, Islamabad is raising a CPEC Protection Force,
the costs of which will be passed on to Pakistani citizens. The State Bank of
Pakistan has repeatedly called for more
transparency, to no avail. Astonishingly, according to the Pakistani daily The
Dawn, “Despite the frantic activity, Islamabad had yet to
determine the expected cost and benefit, expressed in monetary terms, of
the mega project.” And that’s before factoring in other costs such as the
cultural and religious tensions between Chinese and Pakistanis, although
there’s been a public relations push by both governments to downplay them.
Recently, The Dawn claimed to have accessed the
alleged CPEC “master plan,” drawn up by the
China Development Bank and the National Development Reform Commission of the
People’s Republic of China. It suggests that CPEC is really about agriculture,
an issue that had not previously been discussed in the extensive media coverage
of the plan. As part of the overall project, thousands of acres of productive
agricultural land will be leased to the Chinese for “demonstration projects”
for newly developed seed varieties and irrigation technology. Chinese companies
will be the primary beneficiaries of these initiatives.
Pakistanis should be worried about the way CPEC is shaping up. If
it is even partially executed, Pakistan would be indebted to China as never
before. And unlike Pakistan’s other traditional allies, such as the United
States, China will probably use its leverage to obtain greater compliance from
its problematic client. China is particularly concerned about the Islamist
militant groups active among China’s Uighur Muslim population in Xinjiang.
Uigher militant groups have long shared ties with groups in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, some of which have been patronized by the Pakistani state, such as
the Afghan Taliban. China has used religious and
political oppression, along with crude violence, to eviscerate
the Islamist revival among Xinjiang’s Uighers and has counted on Pakistan to
give China political cover while doing so. In taking on Chinese debt, Pakistan
may also risk severely worsening its already critical relations with India,
which has been watching the CPEC drama unfold with growing alarm. In the north,
CPEC continues to make permanent the Pakistani and Chinese grip on territory
India claims. In the south, Chinese naval vessels may dock in the deep port of
Gwador, threatening New Delhi in the Arabian Sea. In normal times, this would
be a serious concern for the United States — but Washington is so distracted by
the chaos of the Trump administration that the issue has gone largely under the
radar.
But the news may not be all bad. For China to get maximal
returns on its extensive investments in Pakistan as well as Afghanistan it
needs stability in both countries. In recent years, China has stepped up its
role in trying to negotiate peace in Afghanistan by helping to mediate between Pakistan and Afghanistan. As
Pakistan’s economy becomes evermore interwoven with China’s, China may be in a
position to dampen Pakistan’s worrying affinityfor
terrorist groups and nuclear proliferation — particularly the
latter, because China enabled Pakistan’s nuclear program to begin with. If
China took on the responsibility of managing Pakistan, Washington might be
happy to wash its hands of the problem and let the civilians in Islamabad and
the uniformed men in Rawalpindi stab someone else in the back for a change.
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