China and the Afghanistan/Pakistan/India Triangle

By Steve Hynd

  I've never been so disappointed in a top-level think tank report as in CNAS' new "China's Arrival". They assembled a hatful of luminaries to produce a 184 page PDF on "one of the most significant geopolitical events in modern history, with important ramifications for U.S. interests, regional power balances, and the international order," - and not once do they seriously examine China's role in what will be America's main foreign policy engagement for decades. China's role in Af/Pak, through military/economic alliance with Pakistan and rivalry with India, is pervasive and should be a dominant factor in any analysis of how China's interests impact upon America's, yet CNAS' panel of experts only approaches it tangentially.

At least CNAS identifies the primary driver of Chinese foreign policy - energy.

Fears of gradual encirclement by the United States...have also led the Chinese government to enhance its maritime capabilities... Some analysts believe that Chinese efforts to develop a number of ports from the Middle East to the Indian Ocean, what has been described as a �string of pearls,� will ultimately be used to enhance China�s ability to defend its access to oil.

And, as CNAS also notes, China is landlocked to its West. The CNAS panel then makes the mistake of assuming that China is looking only to its sea trade at the expense of overland routes. Yet China's trade has always favored those Silk Road pathways to and from markets in the West. CNAS also notes, correctly, that a goodly part of Chinese policy is aimed at heading off India's potential to eventually rival China's regional dominance, even as China trades with its neighbour. That's where the triangle of Pakistan, India and Afghanistan come in, but CNAS is silent on that.

China has strategically allied itself with Pakistan in a geopolitical move against India which concentrates as much on economics as on military support - although in Pakistan's military-heavy economy the two are inseparable. For instance, dredging the harbor at Gwadar has given both China and Pakistan an important economic asset as well as China an advance naval base. But the overall aim of Chinese sub-continent policy, and its alliance with Pakistan, is to cut off India's overland access to Europe, the Middle East and Asia while enhancing China's own.

That's why Afghanistan is the battleground for these geopolitical rivals. Between Pakistan and China, India is effectively blocked from land routes into the continent, effectively an island should its rivals wish it. Pakistan, on the other hand, sees Afghanistan as giving it strategic depth into which it can withdraw and re-organise in the face of a real Indian attack. Both China and Pakistan see America as being primarily allied with India. The geopolitical necessities of this rivalry therefore dictate that Afghanistan be an impossible nut for America to crack. Both China, the regional power, and Pakistan, the most powerful immediate neighbour, have long term national interests that say an enmired U.S. is a good thing.

As Myra MacDonald of Reuters wrote recently in her insightful post "India, Pakistan and Afghanistan: The Impossible Triangle":

So, to win the war in Afghanistan, the United States needs help from Pakistan, which Pakistan in turn is reluctant to provide so long as it believes it is threatened by India to both the west and east.  From Washington�s point of view, it needs to nudge Islamabad and New Delhi towards the negotiating table, by leaning on Pakistan to act against militant groups and putting pressure on India to resume peace talks. 

Here is another catch. Although the relationship between the United States and India blossomed under former President George W. Bush, there is far less warmth in New Delhi towards the Obama administration. The relationship started on the wrong foot with India concerned about increasing U.S. economic dependence on its rival China.

 China's role as Pakistan's main economic and military backer gives it great infuence. But China's rivalry with India, as represented by continued tensions along their mutual border and the proxy wars they engender, and its long-term rivalry with the U.S. mean that influence isn't at all helpful for U.S. aims in Afghanistan. Indeed, I - and likely General McChrystal - would go so far as to say a COIN approach there is impossible while Pakistan prods in the other direction, with China prodding Pakistan in the background.

Nor is a containment strategy against America's terrorist enemies, such as that suggested by Andrew Bacevitch today, likely to succeed without addressing the underlying motives for regional proxy feuds. The U.S. may not have much leverage with China nowadays, but whatever it has should be applied to defuse, in turn, Sino/Indian and Indo/Pakistan geopolitical rivalries. That's the only way there's ever going to be a chance of success in Afghanistan. Maybe the US should be testing the old adage that if you owe the bank $100 it owns you, but if you owe it $100 million, you own the bank.