Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan: The Price of Strategic Myopia by Ahmad Faruqui

Author:Ahmad Faruqui [Faruqui, Ahmad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780754614975
Google: ElHfAAAAMAAJ
Goodreads: 6852878
Publisher: Ashgate
Published: 2002-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

Roots of the Sino-Pakistani Relationship

Pakistan recognized the People’s Republic in 1950, and did not condemn China’s invasion of Tibet in that year. In 1956, Pakistan’s Prime Minister H.S. Suhrawardy visited China and Premier Zhou Enlai visited Pakistan later the same year. Zhou Enlai indicated that there was no reason why the two countries could not be friends, allaying concerns that Pakistan’s membership of CENTO and SEATO would get in the way of developing close ties with China. However, on the question of Kashmir, he encouraged India and Pakistan to ‘settle this question directly between themselves’.2

In 1959, President Ayub broached China on the need to demarcate the 200-mile border between the two countries in Kashmir. The agreement was signed on March 2, 1963.3 The Chinese agreed to abide by the line of control on the Pakistani maps, with marginal adjustments. This line of control passed through the world’s second highest mountain, K-2, thus letting the mountain peak belong to both sides, as had been done for Mount Everest with Nepal. The watershed areas of the Indus Basin rivers were given to Pakistan and those for the rivers of Yakang to China. Notably, China ceded to Pakistan 750 square miles of territory beyond the main watershed of the Karakorum Range.4 Ayub Khan observed, ‘This agreement on border demarcation was the first step in the evolution of relations between Pakistan and China. Its sole purpose was to eliminate a possible source of conflict in the future. But as a result of this agreement, the Chinese began to have trust in us’.5

In August 1963, the two countries signed an air travel agreement that allowed Pakistan International Airlines to begin air service to Beijing, long before any airline from the non-communist world.6 This agreement was reached in large measure because China did not have diplomatic ties with several European countries that wanted to initiate air service.7 Subsequently, China provided significant amounts of economic and military aid to Pakistan, helped set up an indigenous defense production capability,8 and more recently provided missile and nuclear technology over vociferous US objections. Till fairly recently, China has consistently backed Pakistan on the issue of Kashmir. Chinese maps often show Kashmir as a region that belongs to neither Pakistan nor India.

Unfortunately, Pakistan has often ignored China’s advice, to its own peril. In the run up to the 1965 war with India, China’s Prime Minister, Zhou Enlai, had advised Pakistan to wage a people’s war in Kashmir.9 The Chinese strategy revolved around a deceptively simple folk poem that Mao Zedong wrote during the revolutionary war and that subsequently guided the strategy of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA):

The enemy advances, we withdraw.

The enemy rests, we harass.

The enemy tires, we attack.

The enemy withdraws, we pursue.10

As noted by General Musa, Pakistan’s army chief during that period, the Chinese felt that Pakistan’s strategy was too forward, since it was designed to take on a numerically superior enemy right at the border. The Chinese advised Pakistan to fall back, draw the Indian army into Pakistani territory,

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