Chief in China

It may have been a sheer scheduling coincidence that Army Chief Raheel Sharif visited China at the same time as US President Barack Obama’s high-profile India trip but it served to show the shifting alliances in the region at this precarious time. Pakistan is justly worried that the US, now that it has pulled out most of its troops from Afghanistan, will revert to its policy of the 1990s and leave us in the lurch, especially now that India is becoming an ever more important trading partner. For the US, a move towards India is logical right now since China is threatening to become the dominant country in the region and, despite its economic ties with the US, is still seen as a threat and a rival. The bonhomie shown by China towards Pakistan during Sharif’s trip, where Foreign Minister Wang Yi called us an ‘irreplaceable all-weather friend’, should be seen in the context of the changing tide in the region. Our closeness to China is based not on shared ideology but shared interests. China needs Pakistan as a bulwark against Indian influence and we similarly need China to plead our case at international forums and provide us with the assistance in defence and energy that we so badly need.
The PML-N government, to its credit, has reached out to China even more than previous governments and secured funding for a host of energy projects, the development of Gwadar and the Pakistan-China economic corridor. At the same time, we are still on better-than-usual terms with the US and have even asked for assistance with our energy crisis. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, in fact, even chaired a cabinet meeting on the energy crisis where it was decided to ask both China and the US for help to prevent future blackouts. Raheel Sharif’s trip served to beef up defence cooperation with China and in that he succeeded. China promised to ramp up intelligence sharing and counterterrorism training and praised Pakistan for the determination with which it is pursuing militant groups in North Waziristan. The problems of militancy and energy will be the main challenges we face for the foreseeable future and to combat them successfully we cannot rely on any one country. This is why Obama’s closeness with Narendra Modi and the army chief’s China visit should not be seen as a shift away from the US. Rather we need all the help we can get and so need to take advantage of the opportunity provided in the form of China and India’s rivalry. It is also encouraging that we have recently reached out to Russia, a country with which we have had historically poor ties. In the event that the US decides to move away from Pakistan we will then be in a better position to deal with the fallout.