The bond between China and Pakistan is often called as high as the highest peaks, as deep as the deepest ocean. When things are going well, the proximity phrase — “as close as lips and teeth” — is thrown in, with winces on both sides.
Beware, Daniel S. Markey says in his lively new book, “No Exit From Pakistan: America’s Troubled Relationship With Islamabad” (Cambridge University Press). The sentimental language between Islamabad and Beijing masks a relationship that is not quite so profound. There is little need for Washington, he argues, to fear that China would like to supplant the United States in Pakistan.
China is Pakistan’s leading arms supplier, and the two armies conduct war games and drills together. China, seemingly unconcerned about Pakistan’s rapidly expanding nuclear weapons program, is currently building two nuclear reactors to help meet Pakistan’s desperate energy needs. China also appears to be moving ahead with providing two much larger nuclear reactors, Mr. Markey said in an interview.
The Chinese reactors are not so troublesome to the United States that Washington has protested, Mr. Markey said. That’s because the administration of President George W. Bush sealed a civilian nuclear deal with India in 2005, making it difficult, he said, for the United States to object to the new 1,000-megawatt Chinese reactors on offer to Pakistan. When China sold Pakistan two smaller nuclear reactors several years ago, the United States lodged a weak protest with the Nuclear Suppliers Group, a body that is supposed to control the proliferation of nuclear materials, he said.
“There are smarter and less worrisome ways for Pakistan to get energy,” Mr. Markey said of the new Chinese reactors. “But the Chinese don’t see the reactors as profoundly destabilizing, and there is no push back from the United States.” India complains that the reactors could help Pakistan’s well-established nuclear weapons program.
Mr. Markey, a former State Department official who worked on Pakistan policy during the Bush presidency and is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has written an insider’s account of how the United States and Pakistan resemble characters in Jean Paul Sartre’s play “No Exit.” They find hell is not a place of fire and devils, but a living room where they perpetually torment one another. It’s a nice metaphor for how Pakistani and American diplomats often confide how they see each other.
Mr. Markey has traveled to Pakistan often, and he knows many of the players in government, business and civil society. He has visited China and concludes that the main connection between Pakistan and China is their joint interest in upsetting India.
Beyond balancing Pakistan against India, China does not — for the moment, anyway — see Pakistan, with its destabilizing radical groups and homegrown Taliban, as “strategically useful,” Mr. Markey says. In the future, China would like to see a stable Pakistan that offers a land route to the Arabian Sea and serves as a steppingstone to Iran and Central Asia.
But that’s a way off. As evidence of Pakistan’s chronic instability: The Chinese-built port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea remains unused. Building a highway from the port to western China would involve construction across the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, the base of Taliban groups protected by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies and territory too forbidding for even the Chinese.
Some of the most fascinating details in Mr. Markey’s account throw light on China as a moderating influence in spats between Pakistan and the United States. When relations between Washington and Islamabad reached a low after the United States killed Osama bin Laden, Beijing counseled Pakistan to moderate its anger and rejoin the Americans at the negotiating table. China has also advised Pakistan to take it easy in the disputed region of Kashmir, and it supported an initiative during the rule of Gen. Pervez Musharraf for talks with India, Mr. Markey reports.
“An exclusive, narrow alliance with an isolated Pakistan, particularly one at odds with the United States, would not be China’s preferred way to achieve either its short-term or long-term goals,” Mr. Markey writes.
It sounds as though Pakistan is one place where the United States does not need to fret about China gaining ground.
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