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Pakistan’s Dreadful Moment: Beijing Or Washington?

Ahmed Quraishi - 4/16/2008

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—For Pervez Musharraf’s critics in Pakistan who see him as some kind of a secret U.S. agent, here’s a news flash: If anything, your President is a Chinese stooge. There’s no capital in the world he visited more than Beijing. In recent years, he’s been to China at least eight times. More if you count his entire military career.

China is proof that you can build durable institutions even if you don’t copy British democracy. The result is the same: Openness. China may not be a picture of Western democracy, but it is vibrant, diverse and inclusive with strong state institutions and where decisions are based on debate and consensus. This doesn’t mean that the Chinese model is perfect or that anyone should copy it. But it beats Iraq, where a premature overdose of Anglo-American democracy proved fatal.

After nearly half a century of impressively balancing relations with both Beijing and Washington, Islamabad seems to be approaching a decisive moment. A moment Pakistani diplomats have been dreading for long: Are we with China or the United States?

The answer is important because no matter how we the Pakistanis or our Chinese friends try to emphasize wider regional cooperation that benefits everyone, the United States and a handful of allies are bent on creating conflict. And Washington would not be able to pursue this agenda without two things: One, the Afghan theater of operations and, two, the active support of an important regional country: India.

It is not only the deliberate attempts to humiliate China, manufacture a crisis in Tibet and obstruct the Beijing Summer Olympics. The chessboard is being rearranged across the region for a grand confrontation. NATO contingents are being beefed up on Pakistan’s western border coupled with on-again-off-again threats of invading Pakistan.

As one more evidence that Afghanistan has become a base for anti-Pakistan operations, the U.S. puppet regime in Kabul is dangerously provoking Islamabad in the same way that India is poking Beijing. On Friday the Afghan defense minister visited Indian occupied Kashmir and asked Indian military officers to brief him on how to combat Pakistani influence. At the risk of sounding like a script for a James Bond movie, there are reports about fake ISI agents in Afghanistan setting up training camps to recruit and train misguided Chinese Muslims. It’s a creative way of infiltrating Chinese Muslims and malign Pakistan in Chinese eyes. No brownie points here for guessing who is behind this one.

Make no mistake here: India is strangely positioning itself as a ‘China Watchdog’ in the region. After copying Hollywood movies and U.S. diplomatic jargon in the hope of evincing a ‘superpower aura’, New Delhi over the weekend plagiarized a page from the book of Chinese diplomacy, inviting twenty-two African nations to the Indian capital for a ‘India-Africa Summit’.

Never mind that the original China-Africa Summit two years ago attracted 48 African nations. Chinese President Hu Jintao was flanked by Africa’s most influential leaders, like Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. New Delhi’s ‘copycat summit’ was weak on this count. Only eight presidents were in attendance, the most prominent among them the president of Kenya, whose athletes are keen to boycott Chinese Olympics.

With increased American intrusiveness in Pakistan, Islamabad needs to be aware that this is bound to fuel worry in Beijing. This newspaper has reported yesterday that Washington is now asking Islamabad to accept a permanent American ‘special envoy for Pakistani nukes’ to be based in the U.S. embassy in Islamabad.

The Chinese are polite by nature. But as a Pakistani journalist, you can sense some unease among Chinese foreign policy experts regarding the extent of access that we have granted our American friends within our territories. Since 2004, Afghan-based intrigues are also largely responsible for destabilizing the entire Pakistani region that links Gwadar to our border with China. Partial blame is our own.

Tomorrow afternoon, the Olympic torch will come to Islamabad. Pakistan will send a bold message to everyone when the nation’s leadership shows up at the torch relay. It is an important symbolic gesture of our support for the Chinese Olympics and for the Chinese vision of region-wise cooperation. All Pakistanis need to celebrate this moment.

If the 2008 Beijing Olympics are being politicized, let there be no doubt where Pakistan stands.