Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

In our 20 July briefing we looked at how anti-Americanism in Pakistan has reached unprecedented levels and how this is, in turn, fuelling calls for ever-closer ties with China.  It is not surprising, therefore, that Pakistan has been greatly disconcerted by Beijing’s claims that the Muslim militants who carried out the two bomb attacks on 30 and 31 July in China’s Xinjiang province, killing 18 people, had been trained in Pakistan.

Xinjiang is populated by the Uighurs, a Muslim Turkic people who have become a minority in their own region because of Han Chinese immigration.  The province accounts for 17% of China’s land area and produces around 40% of the country’s oil, coal, and gas.  It is also strategically important as a gateway to Central Asia.  The first signs of armed opposition appeared after the ousting of the Soviets from Afghanistan in 1990.  More recently, there was rioting in the capital Urumqi in July 2009 in which more than 200 people were killed and 1,700 injured.  The latest bombings, in Kashgar, are thought to have been the work of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (Etim).

Immediately following the bombings, on 1 August, Chinese officials claimed that Etim militants were learning explosives and weapons skills in training camps in the tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.  These allegations prompted Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari to speak to China’s President Hu Jintao on the telephone; and Lt General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the director-general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) rushed to Beijing in a further attempt to placate China and to assure total Pakistani cooperation in rooting out Etim.

There is nothing surprising about the desperate Pakistani scramble to reassure Beijing, and it is completely in line with the trends we reported in our 20 July briefing.  However, there are two additional factors that merit further attention.  The first are indications from Pakistani intelligence sources that China may be seeking a military presence in Pakistan’s tribal areas so as to take a direct role in countering Etim activities on Pakistani soil.  This would be a dramatic departure for China.

The second is the attempt within sections of the Pakistani media to blame external forces for the trouble caused by Etim and for trying to drive a wedge between Pakistan and China.  The pro-military Pakistan Observer, for instance, carried a report on 9 August that claimed: “The US and India [have] highlighted the acts of terrorism in Xinjiang and presaged that relations between Pakistan and China would be affected by such acts.  There is a perception that they [the US and India] have made inroads into militant organizations and are trying to spoil relations between Pakistan and China.”  The paper warned about “a conspiracy to create a wedge between Pakistan and China through devious plans and actions”.

On the same day, the Dawn newspaper carried a commentary by Mushahid Hussain, chairman of the Pakistan-China Institute, which made much the same point about the US and India seeking to exploit China’s ethnic fault lines and playing the “Xinjiang card” along with the “Tibet card”.