Pakistan courts China as relations with US grow strained Friday, 24 June 2011 05:29

n the city of Abottabad where US Navy SEALs touched down long enough last month to kill Osama bin Laden and to ignite a national furor, residents are courting another foreign invasion. They want China, the emerging superpower just 400 miles to the north along the Karakoram Highway, to invest in this economically depressed region and bring roads, energy, trade and jobs.

“China is our path to prosperity,” said Haidar Zaman, the city’s former mayor. Many Pakistani leaders believe the same can be true for the entire country: With US-Pakistani relations at their lowest point in the past decade, top Pakistani officials have been promoting China as an alternative benefactor that could deliver badly needed economic and military might without the relentless criticism offered by Washington.

But the drive to migrate Pakistan away from the United States and into the Chinese orbit has run into a cold reality: China’s just not that interested.

China’s tentative approach to Pakistan helps explain why, despite widespread antipathy here toward the United States, Pakistan is reluctant to force a deeper rupture in relations with Washington, which supplies billions of dollars in aid.

Ironically, the same factors that keep the United States heavily invested in Pakistan — terrorism and instability — have persuaded China to hold Pakistan at arm’s length. “What the Americans are doing here — that’s just not a role that China wants to take on,” said Ashraf Ali, who leads the FATA Research Centre, a think tank that focuses on militancy in Pakistan’s northwest.

A Chinese official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject described Pakistan as a close ally, both politically and militarily, and said it represents a significant business opportunity for Chinese firms. But he also expressed apprehension about Islamist extremism here, and noted that any attempt to turn Pakistan into a central trading corridor for China would-be a decades-long project.

Pakistani officials would prefer a more unconditional embrace. Both President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani visited China soon after the bin Laden raid May 2, with Gilani pointedly calling China “Pakistan’s best friend.”

The military here has trumpeted China’s recent decision to supply Pakistan with 50 new fighter jets, even as army officials say they would rather do without US assistance. Top generals have been contemplating what it would mean for Pakistan to take a stronger stand against Washington, and receive a greater share of aid from Beijing.

Economic development experts, meanwhile, have been busy drawing up grand plans for ports, pipelines and railways so that Pakistan can reap the full benefit of China’s global rise.

favourable view

Pakistanis love China just about as much as they dislike the United States: 87 percent of Pakistanis say they have a favorable view of China, compared with 12 percent who say the same about the United States, according to a Pew survey. The divergent attitudes begin early: Schoolchildren here are taught that the China-Pakistan partnership is “as high as the mountains and as deep as the seas,” but that the United States has been a fickle friend.

Those perceptions have hardened of late amid US pressure on Pakistan to do more in the fight against militant groups, and a widespread sense that US assistance comes with strings while China’s does not. U.S. lawmakers have been particularly critical of Pakistan since the bin Laden raid, while Pakistan has bristled at not being notified in advance.

“The Chinese are not involved in internal Pakistani problems,” said Amir Rana, director of the Pak Institute for Peace Studies. “Washington gives statements about Pakistan every day. China prefers to give its reaction only when needed.”

But that is not to say China does not have strong interests here. Most important, Pakistan serves as a check on the rising influence of India, China’s main rival for Asian supremacy.

Pakistan’s location is also strategically important to China. A Chinese-built deep-sea port in the southwestern Pakistani city of Gwadar offers Chinese companies a potentially faster route to natural resources — including energy supplies — in the Middle East and Africa. It also gives China a possible shortcut for transporting goods from its western regions to foreign markets, and for projecting its growing naval influence into the Arabian Sea.

But the port, which opened in 2008, has so far been a disappointment. While former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf hailed it as the next Dubai, Gwadar has attracted little business. When Pakistani Defense Minister Chaudhary Ahmed Mukhtar floated the idea last month of China building a naval base at Gwadar, China politely denied any such plan. Much of the problem is Gwadar’s isolation: The port is in Balochistan, a remote and relatively lawless province that lacks a viable road network.

In the long term, China hopes to link Gwadar with the Karakoram Highway, another major Chinese investment in Pakistan that has yielded few dividends. The world’s highest paved international road, the highway is an engineering marvel that slices through 15,000-foot-high mountain passes, but attracts sparse traffic: A massive landslide last year buried a miles-long stretch of the road under water, and any goods being transported between Pakistan and China must now make part of the journey by boat.

Still, China is upgrading the road, which enters the country near its western border in the restive and underdeveloped Xinjiang region. Long-term plans call for the addition of an oil pipeline.

“We should have capitalized on the China opportunity far earlier. We had a highway into China in the 1980s. We could have had the first-mover advantage,” said Sakib Sherani, a former top Pakistani finance official.

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