News
Wednesday, October 05, 2011
China to keep Pakistan embrace at arm’s length* Beijing is treading carefully amid Pak-US rift
* Any help that China can provide to Pakistan will be limited
* China is wary about offending India
BEIJING: Pakistan, facing a crisis with the United States, has leaned closely to longtime partner China, offering its “all-weather friendship” with Beijing as an alternative to Washington.
But Pakistan will be disappointed if it hopes to replace American patronage with the same from China.
While China does not welcome the US presence near its border, it wants stability on its western flank and believes an abrupt withdrawal of Washington’s support for Pakistan could imperil that. It also does not want to upset warming relations with India by getting mired in subcontinent security tension.
Maintaining that delicate balance, China will continue supporting economic cooperation with Pakistan but go slow on defence cooperation. While outwardly all smiles and warm pledges of friendship, China will quietly keep things at arms length. “I think they see what’s going on in the US-Pakistan front at the moment as reason to tread very carefully,” said Andrew Small, a researcher at the German Marshall Fund think-tank in Brussels.
Pakistan’s brittle relationship with the United States, its major donor, has turned openly rancorous. Washington accused Pakistan’s powerful ISI spy agency of directly backing the Afghan Taliban-allied Haqqani network and of providing support for a September 13 attack on the US mission in Kabul.
Pakistan has angrily rejected the accusation and warned the United States that it risked losing an ally if it kept publicly criticising them over militant groups.
Meanwhile, as it often does in times of crisis, Pakistan has been trumpeting its ties with China.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani declared Beijing and Islamabad were “true friends and we count on each other”. Publicly at least, China has gone out of its way to reassure Pakistan.
In May, just weeks after US forces killed Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil, Premier Wen Jiabao reassured visiting Gilani of their longstanding friendship and spoke of the “huge sacrifices” Pakistan had made in the global struggle against terrorism.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman echoed that line just last week, saying “Pakistan is on the front lines in the fight against terrorism” and China hoped “the relevant countries respect every country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
But China’s assistance also has limits. “The ‘all-weather friendship’ doesn’t mean that all of Pakistan’s bills should be paid by us,” said Zhao Gancheng, director of South Asia studies at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies.
China regards Pakistan as an important strategic counterweight against its longstanding rival, India, and a hedge against US influence across the region.
China is a major supplier of military hardware to Pakistan and also a major investor in areas such as telecommunications, ports and infrastructure.
But China’s leaders have no desire to turn that limited stake in Pakistan into a heavy security footprint. Beijing also appears much less interested in a bilateral defence accord, despite a report by Pakistan media that Islamabad had been secretly lobbying for such an agreement.
“I don’t think that’s the sort of space that the Chinese want to get into,” said Small of the German Marshall Fund.
Analysts say China is wary about tilting the relationship too much in favour of Pakistan, to avoid offending India, with which China wants to develop better economic ties. reuters
Courtesy www.dailytimes.com.pk