A dragon of the imagination

So much for the scenario-builders. The vote against China in the US House of Representatives was ignored and Indian experts setting up China as the US’s future global rival had to shut up, leaving their imitative Huntingtonians in Pakistan to mull over the new Sino-American equation.

In India, the China-is-no-threat lobby gatheredstrength in the Lok Sabha, their facts coming from centres set up in Delhi to `study the enemy’. The opposition said that China was not a threat and that they didn’t want the bomb, to the astonishment of the common man `uplifted’ by Pokharan-II.

The study-the-enemy concept is Western and has been used in India and Pakistan without much thought. Neither expected that the centres would start `getting friendly’ towards the enemy.

Lahore’s South Asia Centre was `set right’ long ago when it started reading too many Indian journals, but in India the China scholars were allowed to carry on. And now the Indian government has to contend with hard facts from them.

The China experts lost no time in concluding that the 1962 war between China and India happened because of Nehru’s hubris. No Indian remembers the `humiliation’ of 1962 except certain sections of the Indian Army. India established a lucrative relationship with the USSR in return for opposing the US in Afghanistan and providing a nutcracker response toChina.

But during the Afghanistan war, when India was isolated globally because of its support to the Soviet Union, a Sino-Indian thaw began. China supplied heavy water to India’s nuclear plants from 1981 to 1987.

India felt more isolated when Gorbachev made his famous Ussuri River speech in 1985 and made overtures to China. Delhi broke the ice with Beijing in 1988. China stopped supplying arms to Nepal and accepted India’s influence over Sri Lanka and the Maldives. China and India withdrew troops from the borders and started resolving minor disputes, leaving the big borders dispute aside. In 1995 China supplied enriched uranium under safeguards to India’s Tarapur reactor. In 1996, President Jiang went on a very friendly tour of India, then came to Pakistan and shocked everyone by suggesting that Pakistan and India leave Kashmir aside and normalise relations in other areas.

Pakistan was fated to sleep with strange bedfellows. As a land of military dictators, it carried on with the US, the world’s mostaggressive democracy. As a religious state with an aggressive Islamic agenda at home, it carried on with an atheistic China.

Abstractions like sincerity and permanent friendship have always been used by Pakistanis to describe the equation. For China during its days of isolation Pakistan was the chink in the armour of US pacts. It realised that Pakistan was not keen on fighting communism and that its only hangup was India. It embarked on its policy of challenging India by becoming a countervailing force in South Asia.

China has moved on from there. It has normalised relations with all its Cold War adversaries. But Pakistan has not been able to do so with India. Its foreign policy since 1990, when the Kashmir uprising began, has become more inflexible. Hence the new perception in Pakistan that China’s support has become lukewarm.

This overturns the thesis of `permanence’. After the May 11 Indian tests, Foreign Secretary Shamshad Ahmad presumably asked the Chinese for a mutual defence pact. Had there beena proper India studies centre in Pakistan, he would not have gone to Beijing with this brief.

India’s China scholars take the rumoured export of M-11 missiles to Pakistan with a pinch of salt. They took note of a remark made by a Chinese scientist at an international meet in Sichuan that M-7, M-9 and M-11 missiles were developed by the Chinese missiles factory to avoid bankruptcy. The M-11 cannot reach Indian targets even from Tibet. Since China doesn’t perceive a threat from India, it has stopped developing any aggressive nuclear response towards it.

The US is divided on China. It is generally agreed that China will not be able to challenge the US globally but might flex its muscles in Asia. But the effect of the new global trade order on China cannot be assessed. No country has benefited more from it than China. Other than the EU and Japan, it is able to export more to the US than America’s other trading partners.

It has borrowed heavily from the IMF and is the biggest client of the World Bank. It hasbecome prosperous and is undergoing unprecedented social change.

China’s new leadership differs from the earlier generation of communists. It doesn’t interface as easily with the army. It gives more attention to the economy. When it devalued the Yuan two years ago, South East Asian markets fell. Japan’s decline bothers it too. China has become more enmeshed in the global economy than the military strategists imagining a hostile multipolar world can understand.

Pakistan’s position on Kashmir will distance it from China. After Chaghai, it `challenges’ the world and India for a solution along lines that it considers right, instead of `advocating’ a fair position. Its misfortune is that it can’t change its Kashmir policy even if it wants to. After becoming a nuclear power, a climbdown on Kashmir would look stupid to its own people.

India has been proved wrong in its assessment of Sino-American relations. The latest events have proved many Pakistani strategists wrong too. A majority of Pakistanis have lookedupon the two as natural adversaries. Through a strategic contortion bordering on fantasy they thought that this global rivalry would advantage Pakistan. Earlier they had also thought on similar lines about US-Japan relations. Pakistan is bedeviled by a lack of understanding of economic forces at the global level. Most of its economists have gone `political’, which is perhaps a greater national tragedy than misgovernment.

The writer is a noted Pakistani journalist. This article first appeared in The Friday Times (Lahore) where he is a columnist.