Pakistan and China participate in anti-terrorism drill

Pakistan and China participate in anti-terrorism drill, originally uploaded by www.first-pakistan.blogspot.com.

Pakistan and China participate in anti-terrorism drill

*JHELUM: Paratroopers hurtling head first out of planes, attack helicopters
strafing a terror training centre and shacks blown to bits were this week’s
latest embodiment of China-Pakistan friendship.*

The war games conducted by 540 Chinese and Pakistani soldiers running
around scrubland —the fourth joint exercises since 2006 —were ostensibly a
chance for China to benefit from Pakistan’s counter-terrorism experience.

There was disappointment that fighter jets were unable to carry out a
bombing raid, with visibility apparently poor, but the exercises were
declared a success in terms of deepening friendship and improving military
cooperation.

But behind the pomp rolled out for the Chinese, complete with slap-up
marquee lunch and bags of presents, the relationship is as transactional as
any other, as China competes with Pakistan’s arch-rival India for Asian
dominance.

And it is far from easy to decipher. “They operate silently so as not to
make any statements in public apart from cliches. So one doesn’t know
what’s happening,” said retired Pakistani general Talat Masood.

China is Pakistan’s main arms supplier, while Beijing has built two nuclear
power plants in Pakistan and is contracted to construct two more reactors.

But the alliance has been knocked by Chinese accusations that the
separatist East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which wants an
independent homeland for Xinjiang’s Muslim Uighurs, is training
“terrorists” in Pakistani camps.

Those accusations mirror long-standing concerns from the United States that
Taliban and al Qaeda bases are funnelling recruits to fight in Afghanistan
and hatch terror plots against the West.

During the exercises outside Jhelum, 85 kilometres (50 miles) southeast of
Islamabad, generals watched troops attack, clear and destroy a mocked-up
training camp, while smoking and sipping cups of tea under a giant tent to
keep off winter rays.

Chinese deputy chief of staff Hou Shusen and Pakistan’s army chief Ashfaq
Kayani sat together in the front row, guests of honour incapable of talking
to each other without the help of an interpreter.

“We have done our utmost to eliminate this threat of ETIM and other
extremists for China because we consider honestly that China’s security is
very dear to Pakistan,” Kayani told a news conference after the war games.

He said that Pakistan had provided intelligence during the 2008 Beijing
Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai Expo, and reiterated demands for closer
military cooperation and larger imports of military hardware from China.

Beijing was instrumental in getting the United Nations and United States to
blacklist ETIM as a terrorist organisation in 2002, but experts have
questioned how much of a threat such a small group of people really poses.

Pakistani analysts believe members number no more than hundreds and are
fairly dispersed in the remote mountains on the Pakistan-China border.

Despite that issue, if the language used to describe Pakistan’s febrile
relationship with the United States is that of an unhappy couple wishing
but unable to divorce, then the hyperbole used to describe China is that of
an ecstatic lover.

“Higher than mountains” and “sweeter than honey” were phrases used by Prime
Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani when Chinese Public Security Minister Meng
Jianzhu came to town in September, at a time when relations with the US
were at their most difficult in years.

The top US military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, had just accused Pakistan
of colluding with Afghan militants in besieging the US embassy in Kabul as
ties plummeted further after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

But independent China analyst Michael Dillon says that without any real
ideological links, China’s relationship with Pakistan is primarily
strategic, designed to offset its rivalry with India.

“There is a feeling that cooperation with Pakistan on counter-terrorism
might be in China’s interests,” he told AFP.

“They’ve got economic domination over Southeast Asia. But South Asia is
another matter. The big rival is India. If they can get close
diplomatically to Pakistan then it can balance the power of India in the
subcontinent,” he said.

Neither can China present an alternative to the US alliance.

But Kayani described China as “very important” to regional stability,
perhaps best seen against a backdrop of Pakistan’s own rivalry with India.

“It’s not a zero-sum game. You further strengthen your relations with
China, then you increase your importance. You use this as a leverage to
improve your relationship with the US,” said Masood.