The
regional security in South Asia and the adjacent regions to the west and north are
on the cusp of a profound transformation. Broadly, there are three vectors
involved here.
One, Iran’s integration with the international community as a ‘normal
country’, a process that has already begun; two, the historic entente between
Russia and China which has consolidated almost immeasurably in the past one
year period since the New Cold War tendencies began appearing; and, three, a
largely-unnoticed but extremely significant shift in the foreign-policy
priorities of Pakistan, a genuinely ‘pivotal’ state in the politics of South
Asia, given its highly strategic geographic location in the South Asian region,
from where it impacts regional security in Central Asia and West Asia.
The state visit by the Chinese President Xi Jinping to Pakistan on
Monday in many ways brings together the three vectors. The visit is, on the
face of it, a bilateral event of historic significance to the long-standing
ties between the two relationship, which from all accounts can be expected to
add much strategic content to the relationship and elevate it to an altogether
qualitatively new level.
However, China is also playing the long game insofar as Beijing is
actually beginning the implementation of its “One Belt, One Road” initiative,
which is a global project in character and scope and all but prefaces China’s
inexorable rise on the world stage as a superpower.
It is extraordinary that China is committing such massive investment in
excess 40 billion dollars in a single country, undeterred by the perception in
the western financial circles that Pakistan is a “failing state” and a
revolving door of international terrorism.
In the eighties or nineties, this would have lent itself to
interpretation as “India-centric” and as a diabolical move by the Chinese
policymakers to strengthen Pakistan’s capacity to challenge India, a common
foe. But that is no more the case today. The impulses driving the Chinese
policies toward Pakistan today are to be found elsewhere.
First and foremost, Pakistan’s stability has come to be a matter of serious
concern from the perspective of China’s internal security needs, which is
attributable not only to the spurt in terrorist activities in Xinjiang by
groups that are to be traced to the Af-Pak region, but also out of China’s
emergent concerns as a stakeholder in regional stability that is an imperative
need to advance its regional and global policies (politico-military, economic
and cultural) more optimally.
The dramatic shift in the Chinese thinking apropos of the issues of
terrorism in South Asia and Beijing’s unmistakable empathy with India’s
concerns as a victim of terrorism testify to this. A leading Indian daily
brought this home today reporting from Beijing an extraordinary statement
attributed to the head of the Chinese foreign ministry think-tank Institute of
South and Southeast Asian and Oceanic Studies, Hu Shisheng that China finds
itself “awkward diplomatically” to have taken a “neutral stand” on the
terrorist attack on Mumbai in November 2011.
Hu said, “India’s concerns over terrorism will be addressed in a more
constructive way. China also suffered due to terrorism.” He said China has
suffered from U.S. double standards on terrorism and should not behave in a
similar fashion.
Therefore, on the one hand, China hopes to contribute to the
stabilization of Pakistan in a way that the United States has never attempted
in the entire chronicle of its dalliance with Pakistan as a “non-NATO ally”
over the past decades – either due to paucity of resources or lack of genuine
interest or an innate hesitation in getting engaged deeply, while on the other
hand, in terms of both its self-interests and in the larger interests of
regional security, China hopes to leverage its friendship and cooperation with
Pakistan to reinforce the recent shifts in Islamabad’s policies toward
terrorist groups.
If the United States had been hoping that there could be a Sino-American
condominium over Pakistan’s future (something that U.S. officials and analysts
have been propagating in the most recent years), clearly, they have been
barking up the wrong tree. China is showing no sign of interest in getting
entangled with what passes for the US’ regional strategies.
The “Belt and Road” projects that are expected to be unveiled during
Xi’s visit to Pakistan next week are entirely funded out of China’s sovereign
wealth. The heart of the matter is that future historians will take note of
Xi’s visit in 2015 to Islamabad as marking the beginning of the end of American
manipulation of the Pakistani policy calculus, which began six decades ago with
the military coup staged by Ayub Khan in the early 1950s.
At the very minimum, China is creating a situation, wittingly or
unwittingly, whereby the U.S. has no negotiate much harder than ever before to
extract any favors. It is a tactical move on China’s part. But then, in
reality, though, the purge of American influence over Pakistan is also a
strategic necessity for China, given the nature of Washington’s compass
navigating the “pivot to Asia” strategies.
Without doubt, Pakistan (along with Central Asia and Iran) becomes a
gateway for China to the world market and it is crucial for Beijing that
Washington’s ability to block this gateway is “zero”. Pakistan is actually the
single most critical gateway for China in the emergent paradigm. Arguably, that
alone could explain the extraordinary extent to which China is making the
stabilization of Pakistan a real-time dimension to its own national policies of
development.
China’s relations with the Central Asian region are already advanced to
a high level. Despite concerted U.S. attempts to create unease in the Russian
mind regarding China’s rising influence in the Central Asian region, the two
great powers have seen through the American ploys and have carefully calibrated
their moves in such a way that a remarkable degree of harmonization of their
respective policies has been possible so far.
China treads carefully not to be seen as challenging even inadvertently
Russia’s dominant presence in the Central region, while Moscow has its uses for
China’s unmatchable contribution to the region’s economic progress and
development and trusts the Central Asian leaders to appreciate that Russia’s
regional leadership is unique and is irreplaceable, both historically speaking
and in a contemporary sense. Most important, China and Russia share a great
wariness about any projection of American power into Central Asia. Thus, both
China and Russia have become stakeholders in the region’s security and the stability
of the regimes there.
The Russian-Chinese entente and mutual understanding has touched a very
high level today that makes it impossible for Washington to create
misperceptions or sow seeds of discord between the two great powers. The
“westernists” among the Russian elites are generally in retreat and the
objective considerations in which Russia is placed in Eurasia also prompt
Moscow to move closer to Beijing.
Only last week, Russian energy officials for the first time spoke of a
scenario whereby beyond 2019 it will be entirely up to Europe to seek out and
ensure that Russian gas is tapped from Greece where it will reach via the
Turkish Stream pipeline, whereas Moscow will always have the alternative to
divert the “European gas” to the market China via the new Altai pipeline.
Interestingly, Moscow also announced last week that China is the first
country to be supplied its latest S-400 anti-ballistic missile defense system,
which is currently in service only with the Russian armed forces and is rated
as the most capable SAM system in use in the Asia-Pacific region.
To be sure, both China and Russia understand perfectly well that it is
in their common interest to counter the U.S. regional strategies. They have no
illusion that the U.S.’ containment strategy is aimed at both of them and,
therefore, it is in their interest to coordinate their moves to defeat the U.S.
agenda.
Unsurprisingly, a level of coordination between Moscow and Beijing as
regards their regional policies toward Pakistan is also conceivable. The
Russian and Pakistani defense ministers signed an agreement in Moscow on
Friday, just two days before Xi’s arrival in Islamabad, marking the
commencement of the first-ever military exercises between the two countries,
taking a significant step forward in the direction of the “thaw” in the making
in their overall relationship.
To be sure, Russia can be expected to cash in on the decline of American
influence in Pakistan. From the Russian perspective, Pakistan’s cooperation is
vital to augment its efforts to forestall the U.S.’s likely future plans to use
violent Islamist groups as its geopolitical tool to destabilize north Caucasus
and the regimes in the Central Asian region. Russia is beefing up its military
presence in Central Asia against the backdrop of the establishment of U.S.
military bases in Afghanistan and has also opened a political channel to the
national unity government in Kabul. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov received the
Afghan national security advisor Mohammad Hanif Atmar in Moscow this week,
which followed up a visit by the Chief Executive Officer Abdullah Abdullah to
Moscow in February.
Indeed, nothing helps Moscow to frustrate the U.S.’ hostile moves from
the Afghan springboard than the cooperation and understanding from Pakistan. Thus,
both Beijing and Moscow would have noted with interest Pakistan’s claims of a
basic shift in its approach to terrorist groups.
It is apparent Pakistan took an extremely painful decision to spurn the
request from Saudi Arabia for military help to sustain the GCC states’
intervention in Yemen. At the end of the day, it goes much beyond a statement
of Pakistan’s policy toward Yemen. Of course, it became a litmus test of the
vindication of Pakistani public opinion weighing on a representative
democratically elected government.
But, beyond all that lies a profoundly meaningful signpost insofar as it
is also signaling a disinterest in being drawn into yet another war, and a
measure of disengagement, therefore, from Saudi Arabia’s regional enterprises
in general, the likelihood of a deleterious impact on the overall climate of
relations between the two allies notwithstanding.
Simply put, Islamabad is also showing reluctance bordering on
disinterest in dabbling with a regional-policy trajectory that has ultimately
brought only unspeakable sorrows and devastation for itself over the past
decades, ever since the communist takeover in Kabul in 1978 and the Islamic
Revolution in Iran the very next year at which point the Saudi-Pakistani
dalliance began truly blossoming into a full-fledged strategic alliance under
the American patronage, riveted on the lure of “jihadism”.
Both Russia and China would comprehend that Pakistan is desperately
probing a new direction and the obstacles are many. (India too is not helping
matters.) They would realize that it is in their own vital interests that
Pakistan’s search for a new direction gets strengthened and bears fruits so
that it becomes irreversible.
Comparatively speaking, Russia has an added sense of urgency, too, since
it has been at the receiving end of the U.S. – Pakistani alliance for decades
and there could be an end in sight, finally. Suffice it to say, given the
factors at work, the Russian-Pakistani relations are ready for a makeover
precisely at a juncture when the Chinese strategies toward Pakistan are
outgrowing their traditional bilateral (or regional) dimensions and beginning
to assume a global character.
Significantly, both Russia and China (and Pakistan, too) are also
currently restructuring their policies toward Iran even as that country’s
integration with the international community gets under way. There have been
several high-level exchanges between Moscow and Tehran in the past 2-3 period
no sooner than it became clear that the talks between Tehran and the “world
powers” on the nuclear issue had gained traction.
Many new proposals have lately emerged in the direction of adding
strategic content to the Russian-Iranian relationship – return of Russian oil
companies to Iran, construction of more Russian-made nuclear power plants in
Iran, Phase II of Bushehr plant, the $20 billion barter deal whereby Russia
would receive half a million barrels of Iranian oil per day for supply of
various products and so on.
To cap it all, President Vladimir Putin cleared the deal for the S-300
missile defence system for Iran. Evidently, Russia hopes to establish a key
presence in Iran in the energy and military sphere. But the strategic dimension
will be that Russia is encouraging Iran to preserve its independent foreign
policies and “strategic autonomy” and is challenging the West’s aspirations to
transform Iran into a citadel of western interests in a pale image of what it
used to be till the 1979 Islamic Revolution rewrote regional politics and
current history in that region.
Again, there is enough evidence that Russia and China could be
coordinating their approaches toward the New Iran. The Wall Street Journal
reported last week that China might be willing to undertake the construction of
an Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline. Meanwhile, Xi is planning a path-breaking visit
to Iran very soon. A visit by Putin is also pending. Will they beat Obama to
Tehran? They might.
In sum, it makes sense that Russia and China hope to induct Iran and
Pakistan into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization tent (SCO) as a full member
in a very near future. The induction of these two strategically placed regional
powers would bring the SCO to come out of the steppes of Central Asia into the
warm waters of the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf and assume a new identity
as the provider of security for a wide arc of countries. It will be an
inevitable upgrade of Halford Mackinder’s Heartland Theory, attuning it to the
emergent power dynamic in the Pivot Area. Author: M.K. Bhadrakumar
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