Handing over Gwadar Port to China is now too little too late….

If we infer from empirical evidence that Gwadar Deep-sea port on Makran Coast is first of the three major factors of Balochistan insurgency, it will not be an exaggeration. The other two factors are natural gas and oil reservoirs in Balochistan which are “weapons of mass destruction” attracting attention of the West and the USA; and of course Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline. The Gwadar Port has both commercial and strategic significance. It commercial significance hurts economic interests of Pakistan’s so-called friends in the Umma and its strategic importance hurts India and the US. The port was built by China and is undoubtedly a precious gem in the String of Pearls. It gives China a shortest possible route for its import of oil from the Gulf and it gives China and Pakistan a strategic advantage over Indian-built Chabahar port West of Gwadar in Iran.

India and the USA along with UAE had openly opposed the construction of the port through funding and fueling armed resistance in Balochistan. Major outcome of this insurgency is inability of Pakistani government to build enabling infrastructure of rail and roads through Balochistan thus making the port dysfunctional. The operator of the port, Port of Singapore Authority had no long-term stakes in the infrastructure; therefore, it remained dormant while the port was dysfunctional.  During this period, the insurgency remained under check except for media war fought by separatists highlighting the issue of their foot soldiers’ having disappeared.

However, the situation is changing and there is a gross danger of wide-spread insurgency and renewed wave of fighting because of a recent decision of Pakistani government to say goodbye to Port of Singapore Authority and hand over operation of Gwadar deep-sea port to a Chinese corporation. It does not augur well for Pakistan, at least in the near term. This will usher the country in general and the province of Balochistan in particular, into a renewed spate of fierce fighting, killings, terrorist attacks and enhanced level of insurgent and separatist operations. Those opposing this port will try once again to activate the insurgency and do whatever they can to fund and arm the insurgents to make it impossible for China to make the port functional and build the enabling infrastructure. This is what they have been doing ever since construction of the port started.

This decision will inject a certain amount of realpolitik sense to the rhetoric of higher-than-mountains and deeper-than-oceans Sino-Pakistan relations. The United States and Pakistan are not exactly on the best of terms, China is a rising power, they share a common interest in containing India which is in direct conflict with US interests in the region.  As a result, there has been the occasional press story about closer ties, which begets the inevitable U.S.-based blog posts about China expanding its "string of pearls" strategy of more deep-water ports in the Asia/Pacific region. There are some analysts who would want us to believe that this latest development would neither please China nor annoy the US. According to them, a rising China with global ambitions is unlikely to supplant the United States in Pakistan, according to Chinese experts on Pakistan, as well as Pakistani and American officials. And while Pakistan’s latest flirtations with Beijing have been received cordially, Pakistani officials have walked away from their junkets with far less in hand than they might have hoped. This is because “China’s core interests lie elsewhere — in its competition with the United States and in East Asia,. China has shown little interest in propping up the troubled Pakistani economy, consistently passing up opportunities to do so.”

According to a New York Times story, Chinese Firm will Run Strategic Pakistani Port, the fate of Gwadar, once billed as Pakistan’s answer to the bustling port city of Dubai, United Arab Emirates, has been a focus of speculation about China’s military and economic ambitions in South Asia for the past decade. Some American strategists have described it as the westernmost link in the “string of pearls,” a line of China-friendly ports stretching from mainland China to the Persian Gulf, that could ultimately ease expansion by the Chinese Navy in the region. Gwadar is close to the Strait of Hormuz, an important oil-shipping lane. But other analysts note that Gwadar is many years from reaching its potential, and they suggest that fears of creeping Chinese influence might be overblown.

The New York Times is confident that despite Pakistan prostrating itself before China, Beijing has been extremely leery of getting too enmeshed in that country.  It has rejected repeated requests for military basing, and only now has a commercial Chinese company agreed to manage a port that appears to be the Pakistani exemplar of "white elephant. 

The handing over of port operations to Port of Singapore Authority was flawed in the first place. This port should have been operated by China from day one. The decision at this stage is too late too little to say the least. But it will have perilous fallout for the province of Balochistan, for the country and the security establishment. The Court and the media, in the meantime, will have a field day for the reasons best known to everyone.  

Pakistan-bashing is not without a reason....

The current wave of Pakistan-bashing is not without a reason. There are plans to discredit Pakistan and create enabling environments for India to take over Afghanistan after the US departure. Pakistan has been used beyond its capacity and its services are no more required by the US. 


The infamous September 13 attack on the Ring of Steel in Kabul is no different from the previous attacks but, understandably, it has brought tremors in international relations. As anticipated by some cynics, the alliance of 10 years forged to fight terrorism is falling apart, with allies talking tough to each other, pointing fingers and frothing at the mouth.  They are practically at each other’s throats. This attack and its after-shocks in the form of bad-mouthing by the allies, has brought home a very clear message to the world; many thousand lives were lost for nothing and precious years feeding whole one generation on terror-fear have been wasted. And one trillion dollars of US taxpayers’ hard-income have gone down the drain. Today the Taliban, which the world wanted destroyed, are more formidable than 2011. They will gain further strength from the present stand-off between the US and Pakistan. Al Qaeda sitting on the fence is jubilant as it never expected to realize the desired results so easily. The US obliged al Qaeda by blindly walking into mouse trap called Afghanistan.

The attack which was carried out with operational excellence paralyzing US security apparatus in Afghanistan for 20 hours carries two distinct stamps; it was a Taliban job executed by a few fighters and it could not have been carried out so brilliantly without inside help from the US Embassy. Instead of admitting security and intelligence failure, the US has needlessly started looking for a scapegoat. A senior U.S. official -- Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- has publicly fingered the Haqqani network as a tool of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency. What's surprising is that this is particularly newsworthy: ISI's contacts with the Haqqanis, like so many other intelligence outfits, have been an open secret for years. What's different, of course, is that the latest Haqqani attack was not on American forces deployed in Afghanistan but on the U.S. embassy in Kabul -- and that the U.S. government possesses unambiguous evidence of official Pakistani complicity in last week's assault.

But the ISI has always been in the limelight or was being seen in bad light by the media. For every act of secession or violence in remote Indian States called Seven Sisters or the Red Corridor or Jammu & Kashmir, finger was invariably pointed in ISI direction. There was a time of sustained campaign against ISI that it was felt that ISI could even be behind earthquakes, epidemics, poverty, caste system injustices and even broken marriages in India. If ISI is helping Afghans fight USSR, it was an excellent force, if it was working to protect Pakistan and its security interests; it is branded as a rogue agency.

The current campaign against ISI has nothing to do with its alleged role in Taliban attack on Kabul and even the US knows that. It is basically a war between ISI and RAW of India for their respective country’s post-US influence in Afghanistan in which the US is siding with RAW when it no longer needs ISI in its WoT. Such wars between the two agencies are not a new phenomenon.

According to Council on Foreign Relations, RAW set up two covert groups of its own in mid-80s, Counter Intelligence Team-X (CIT-X) and Counter Intelligence Team-J (CIT-J), the first targeting Pakistan in general and the second directed at Khalistani groups. The two groups were responsible for carrying out terrorist operations inside Pakistan . Indian journalist and associate editor of Frontline magazine, Praveen Swami, writes that a "low-grade but steady campaign of bombings in major Pakistani cities, notably Karachi and Lahore" was carried out.

According to Council on Foreign Relations, RAW is also accused of supporting Sindhi nationalists demanding a separate state, as well as Siraikis calling for a partition of Pakistan's Punjab to create a separate Siraiki state. India denies these charges. However, experts point out that India has supported insurgents in Pakistan's Balochistan, as well as anti-Pakistan forces in Afghanistan. But some experts say India no longer does this. Pakistan is suspicious of India's influence in Afghanistan, which it views as a threat to its own interests in the region. Experts say although it is very likely that India has active intelligence gathering in Afghanistan, it is difficult to say whether it is also involved in covert operations.

As against allegations that ISI has contacts with Haqqani Network fighting NATO forces in Afghanistan, RAW has contacts with Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) fighting Pakistani state in Swat, South Waziristan and elsewhere in the tribal region. RAW is many steps ahead of ISI in this respect. It is fanning and fuelling insurgency in Balochistan and FATA and is funding and actually equipping TTP and Baloch insurgents. Some target-killers arrested in recent Karachi unrest confessed to have received training from RAW. No wonder, some call Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan as Tehreek-e-RAWliban Pakistan.

Some pundits are worried that Haqqani network, based in North Waziristan, has never attacked an official target in Pakistan - further evidence of its collusive relationship with that country's security services. When their struggle is focused on fighting foreign occupation forces and their collaborators including India, why should these pundits insist the network attack Pakistan which has no role in Kabul? By this flawed logic, TTP fighting Pakistan and having killed 35000 civilians and 3000 security personnel provide evidence of its collusive relationship with RAW and CIA. And mind you, this fight is taking place right inside Pakistan. By all definitions, TTP and Baloch insurgency is proxy war being fought by RAW inside Pakistan. Major objectives of this proxy war are keeping Pakistan away from Afghanistan to give India decisive role in Kabul, keeping China away from Gwadar-China energy corridor and depriving Pakistan from natural resources of Afghanistan.

After the decision of drawdown from Afghanistan, the U.S. calculus has changed. It will now no longer need Pakistan. It will certainly need India to inherit Afghanistan from the NATO forces to keep India-supported ethnic minority in power. This explains why a sustained campaign was launched some months ago to defame and discredit Pakistan’s security establishment which, in their eyes, is major hurdle against India’s foothold in Kabul.  

According to Foreign Policy, Pakistan is no ally when it comes to the endgame in Afghanistan -- and that plays the role of spoiler in America's relationship with the most potentially important rising power of the 21st: century: India. These developments raise the ugly but necessary question of what a completely different - and adversarial -- U.S. approach to Pakistan would look like, one that dispenses of the underlying logic that the countries are allies at all.

The approach bares the US designs of delivering Kabul to India. The divorce papers are ready, which apparently were written quite a long ago. According to the aforementioned article published by Foreign Policy, such an approach would

1.  Require the United States not to leave Afghanistan to Pakistan's designs but to keep a significant deployment of U.S. troops in place to deter and defeat Islamabad's efforts to renew the sphere of influence it enjoyed there when its Taliban allies were in power.
2. Call for the CIA to cease cooperating with ISI, which it continues to rely on for access to the region, on the grounds that our fundamental goals are incompatible.
3. Suggest doubling down on US relationship with India, including supporting a greater Indian strategic, political, and economic presence in Afghanistan which Americans think, would be welcomed by most Afghans as a stabilizing force in a troubled country.
4. Require the US to convince Beijing not to fill the vacuum left by the withdrawal of American patronage towards Pakistan; China would need to pursue approaches that complement American’s rather than continuing to provide unqualified support to its “revisionist, increasingly radicalized ally”.

This approach would also require American leaders to take a hard look at their own history in the region. The United States walked away from Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 and spent the 1990s sanctioning Pakistan, helping to spawn the anti-Americanism that pervades the officer corps and broader public today.

The article wonders if the Americans are prepared to walk away and sanction Pakistan again, and if they do, are they prepared to deal with the consequences? Or have the current terms of the relationship so manifestly failed that they have no choice?