BRICS Takeout: China’s Attack Dogs, Pakistan And North Korea, Are Beginning To Worry Their Sponsor 

Two events over the last week – the North Korean testing of what is claimed to be a hydrogen bomb, and the BRICS statement on Pakistan-based terror outfits – could mark a turning point in China’s approach to its two closest allies.

The North Korean test, which was in the hundreds of kilotonnes range rather than in the tens in earlier tests, suddenly makes this rogue state a potential threat to China and Russia, not to speak of Japan and South Korea. Hence the closing of ranks between Chinese and Russian leaders over North Korea, with a warning issued to the US not to meddle and make things worse.

The North Korean thermonuclear test turns a rogue into a double-rogue that threatens everybody.

Of more direct interest to India was the statement put out by the five-nation BRICS summit in Xiamen. It surprised everyone – especially China experts in India – by naming two India-focused terrorist groups, among others, as cause for concern. The statement, after condemning “all terrorist attacks worldwide, including attacks in BRICS countries, and terrorism in all its forms...” specifically mentioned the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, both responsible for launching jihadi attacks in India.

The statement read: “We...express concern on the security situation in the region and violence caused by the Taliban, ISIL/DAESH, Al-Qaida and its affiliates, including Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Haqqani Network, Laskar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, TTP and Hizb-ut-Tahrir.”

Commentators in India wondered how China agreed to include the two Pakistan-based terrorist organisations after blackballing several UN Security Council efforts to declare the Jaish a terrorist organisation. The general suspicion is that there could have been an informal backstage deal between India and China, linked to the disengagement on Doklam in the India-China-Bhutan trijunction.

If there was indeed a give-and-take deal, it augurs well for the future of Sino-Indian relations.

An even more simpler explanation could be that both India and China are now more realistic in their expectations from each other, and have accepted the reality that they are frenemies.

In the post-Cold War world, and in the post-9/11 disorder, where the US lost its sole superpower status as China crept up on it, the only geopolitical reality is that almost all allies and enemies are frenemies – part rivals, part partners; they can be enemies in one sphere, and allies in another. The old binaries – you are either with us or against us – are well and truly gone.

The ratio of friendship and rivalry/enmity between any two countries may vary depending on the short-term convergence or divergence of interests, but it is there in almost any relationship. India and the US may be friends in containing China, but in trade and the question of “religious freedom” in India (an idea dear to evangelical groups) there will be friction. Russia and India are reasonable friends, but the old ardour of the Indo-Soviet Friendship Treaty, is gone. As India widens its strategic space by widening its choices for purchases of military and high-tech hardware, Russia is seeking new relationships with Pakistan and China.

The larger message from the two unrelated events is the changing relationship between the sponsor of the two rogue states and the client-states.

Both Pakistan and North Korea were nurtured by China to become nuclear weapons-capable. While Pakistan is China’s attack dog to keep India off balance, North Korea is the loaded gun to keep Japan in line.

But attack dogs have a way of turning against their sponsors. We have seen this with the jihadi groups that the US nurtured to get the Soviets out of Afghanistan only to see them emerge as threats to the US. Internally in India, we have seen how our own covert support to the LTTE become a threat to India itself, leading to the assassination of one former prime minister. Inside Pakistan, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), one of those named by the BRICS statement, is a potent threat to more moderate Islamist political parties and even the Pakistani army.

The underlying reality is that both Pakistan and North Korea have become Chinese frenemies – a covert threat to China itself. Both are nuclear, and Chinese leverage on them may not be as strong as the world presumes. It is doubtful if the Chinese can, for example, completely persuade Pakistan to wind down its jihad factories, nor may it have the leverage with North Korea to roll back its dangerous nuclear ambitions. North Korea can now use its nuclear arsenal to fend off Chinese pressure too.

The only way to defang the North Koreans may be to engineer an internal coup, and take control of its nuclear arsenal. But this will pose another challenge: a defanged North Korea will logically want to unite with South Korea, which will become a senior partner in the same way the unification of Germany created an economic superpower in the heart of Europe in the early 1990s.

A stronger and unified, but de-nuclearised, Korea may be in the world’s interests, but it also will create a new economic power to rival China on its borders, just as Vietnam is emerging to the south, and India to the south-west.

The more limited security issue is this: once you nurture attack dogs, they can just as easily attack you. Put simply, this means both Pakistan and North Korea, while having their uses for China, are beyond China’s ability to control them fully.

This should have been obvious when even a superpower like the US could not get Pakistan to toe its line on jihadism, but China too is learning this the hard way.

The China-Pakistan relationship was often described as “higher than the mountains, deeper than the oceans”, but now more sober reassessments are in order.

The poetic references to eternal friendship are now being given an asterisk by the Chinese, which suggests that terms and conditions may apply.

While it is too early to conclude that there is some serious fissure in the relationship – Pakistan is important both to check India’s rise and for China’s Belt & Road Initiative – the BRICS statement is a signal to Pakistan that it cannot get China’s ultimate endorsement when it cannot control its jihadis. With the launch of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), China now faces jihadi actions not only in its own Xinjiang province, where its Uighur minority is restive, but also in the places where it is investing in Pakistan, including the Baloch port of Gwadar.

That almost all the terrorist organisations named in the BRICS statement have direct or indirect links to Pakistan is no coincidence. The world knows that Pakistan is the Grand HQ of terror, and China cannot be innocent of this reality. The abduction, and possible murder of a Chinese couple by alleged Islamic State jihadis earlier this year, highlighted the threat that Chinese nationals now face increasingly in Pakistan.

After the abduction, China’s Global Times, which was at the forefront of recent sabre-rattling against India after the Doklam standoff, unambiguously said that the kidnapping “highlights the risks along the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor” and that Chinese nationals have often been targeted “despite the friendly relations between” the two nations.

One cannot be sure whether China has moved Pakistan from 100 per cent ally to the marginal frenemy category, but astute strategists in the Dragon country would not have failed to notice that the Pakistani jihadis hate the Chinese as much as they hate Indians. China is an even greater enemy of Islam than the “Christian” west, as it is brutally suppressing Islamists in Xinjiang, going to the extent of discouraging the use of Muslim names and celebration of Muslim festivals. The Chinese want total political control of Uighur expressions of religious nationalism. It will do in Xinjiang what it has done in Tibet.

On the other hand, even the Pakistanis are not sure they are getting a great deal from the CPEC. One economist has, in fact, criticised the CPEC project as inimical to Pakistan’s interests. Pakistan is hardly getting a free ride on Chinese capital. Far from being a “game-changer”, it may mean “game over” for Pakistan, he reckons.

For India, the BRICS statement on terror does not mean that it can relax its guard against China, which can still do the unpredictable after being forced to blink in Doklam. But it does offer India an opening to get its side of the anti-Pakistan, anti-terror narrative across to Chinese strategists. If Chinese strategists figure out that India may be easier to do deals with than Islamist Pakistan, we would have made some progress in creating a new Asia-centric world order.

With China, we must always be prepared for a strong defence, and keep improving our leverage in other areas, including trade, for it is – and will remain – a frenemy.

More than Doklam, Xiamen may be the real turning point.