China to U.S.: "Any Attack on Pakistan Would be Construed as an Attack on China

Society Pakistan & World Affairs
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Quick someone please tell China about the attacks.

http://www.hudson-ny.org/2152/china-warns-us-pakistan

China warns the U.S.: “Any Attack on Pakistan Would be Construed as an Attack on China”

** by Anna Mahjar-Barducci
May 27, 2011 at 4:30 am**

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For some analysts, the killing of Osama bin  Laden could be used as a pretext by Pakistan and China to start a new  war against the U.S., which they accuse of having violated Pakistan's  sovereignty. China would apparently like to gain global economical,  political and military prevalence over the U.S.; whereas Pakistan would  like to ally with China to free itself from its economic dependence on  the U.S., and find backing for its rise as a regional power vis-à-vis  India, its historical enemy.

“Any attack on Pakistan would be construed as an attack on China,” Beijing recently warned the US. After the Abbottabad operation, in which Osama bin Laden was killed, Pakistani Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani’s visited China from May 17 – 21, 2011. His trip was hailed by the Pakistani press as a new historic landmark in bilateral relations, and interpreted as a sign of the progressive breakaway between Pakistan and U.S.
The Pakistani government resented the U.S. raid in Abbottabad, and turned immediately to Beijing to seek shelter under the wings of the communist regime. Now China threatens the U.S. should a similar event occur in Pakistan again. The threat is backed by China’s nuclear capabilities, which include intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that can target both Europe and United States.
During PM Gilani’s visit, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said that Beijing would send a special envoy to Islamabad to express solidarity with Pakistan in this period of shaky relations with U.S.. The Pakistani daily The Nation wrote that “the new chapter is being added to further cement the existing excellent ties [between China and Pakistan], the focus of which would be to ensure mutual defense against all forms of foreign aggression.” The paper further explains that PM Gilani would “apprise Beijing’s top leadership of his country’s experience and lessons learned from America’s deep penetration inside Pakistani territory to kill Osama bin Laden,” adding that “the military top brass and defense think tanks of both countries have been in close contact since the incident of May 2 [the day of the Abbottabad operation], and have been working out a joint defense mechanism.”
China Enhances Pakistan’s Air Force

To a question about Pakistani-U.S. relations after the Abbottabad operation, PM Gilani said that Pakistan will partly revisit its relations with the United States regarding cooperation in counter-terrorism. His words were echoed also by Pakistani Minister of Information Firdous Ashiq Awan, who said on Pakistan TV that the unilateral operation by the United States in Abbottabad has made the nation united [against the U.S.]. He added that concerning relations with the U.S., there is a need to move forward, keeping in mind Pakistan’s national interests.
Sources disclosed that during PM Gilani’s visit, China, one of Pakistan’s largest aircraft providers, agreed to provide Pakistan with 50 new JF-17 Thunder multi-role fighter planes for its air force. China and Pakistan will also discuss the supply of J-20 Stealth and Xiaolong/FC-1 multi-purpose light fighter aircraft to Pakistan. The PAF has a fleet of Chinese aircraft, including F-7PGs and A-5s. The JF-17 “Thunder” program dates back to 1999, and is aimed at reducing Pakistan’s dependence on Western companies for advanced fighters. China has, as well, offered Islamabad “anything” it needs to make defense “impregnable.” Commentator Rashid Ahmad Khan wrote on the website China.org.cn. that China “never treated Pakistan as its junior partner,” but always on equal terms, and mentioned that “China replaced the United States as Pakistan’s principal source for arms and weapons when Washington imposed military sanctions on Pakistan in 1965 and 1990.”
A New War Ahead

Henry Kissinger’s latest book, On China, reveals Beijing’s hegemonic plans. As he puts it, the rise of China could “make international relations bipolar again.” Newsweek magazine reports on Chinese national writers like Liu Mingfu, author of China Dreams, who is urging China to switch from “peaceful development” to “military rise,” and looking forward to the “duel of the century” with the U.S.
Just as the assassination of Archduke Franc Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 was used as the casus belli to formally start World War I, analysts are concerned that China might use the Abbottabad operation against Osama bin Laden as the casus belli to start a new cold war with the U.S. – or even a hot one.

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Re: China to U.S.: "Any Attack on Pakistan Would be Construed as an Attack on China

Even Pakistan does not consider those attacks so?

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Re: China to U.S.: "Any Attack on Pakistan Would be Construed as an Attack on China

China need allies to make him more strong and Pakistan need a power to back him up, this warning make think to usa and neighbour also for any open badmashi against pakistan.

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Re: China to U.S.: "Any Attack on Pakistan Would be Construed as an Attack on China

Yea like China will attack Pearl Harbor or start sending ICBMs toward America. I wish my brothers and sisters in Pakistan stop wishful thinking and start realizing realities of the ground. You are your own best friends.
You should rid your country of all kind of pests then you will not have to look toward anybody else for any kind of help. There are so many tiny countries in this world which are living in peace and harmony on their own , they do not need any crutches.
Living larger than your own means and wishing things which are not possible results in the mess Pakistan and Pakistnies are in now a days on national and individual level.

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Re: China to U.S.: "Any Attack on Pakistan Would be Construed as an Attack on China

^ no country can help another country if its not willing to help itself!

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Re: China to U.S.: "Any Attack on Pakistan Would be Construed as an Attack on China

Country to bohat door ki baat, even God doesn't help those who don't help themselves. So we and only we need to help ourselves.

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Re: China to U.S.: "Any Attack on Pakistan Would be Construed as an Attack on China

US, Arabs, China — will we always be a parasite and sponger? :bummer:

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Re: China to U.S.: "Any Attack on Pakistan Would be Construed as an Attack on China

Do the China-Pakistan pipeline shuffle

From the Gwadar port complex to fighter jet sales, strained relations between the US and Pakistan are benefiting China.

China is adamant that the West “must respect” Pakistan’s sovereignty.

The message was delivered during Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani’s recent four-day visit to Beijing, which celebrated no less than six decades of strategic relations - involving, among other issues, nuclear collaboration and support over the ultra-sensitive Kashmir question.

The Times of India reconstructed the message as a stark warning that: “any attack on Pakistan would be construed as an attack on China.”

Chinese diplomacy dwells on too much sophistication for such a crude outburst; but even enveloped in red velvet, the message - in view of the non-stop US drone war over Pakistan’s tribal areas, not to mention the “get Osama” raid in Abbottabad - was indeed a bombshell.

Whatever the merit of charges that Islamabad helps some Taliban factions - such as the Haqqani network in North Waziristan - the Pakistani politico-security-military establishment has had enough of being treated by Washington as a mere satrapy, or worse, a bunch of punks.

**Pakistani popular opinion, from urban centers to tribal areas, roundly abhors Washington’s drone war. And even before the Navy SEALS raid to get Osama the sordid Raymond Davis case was configured as the ultimate humiliation.

Davis, a CIA asset, shot two Pakistanis dead in broad daylight in Lahore; an American “extraction team” killed another one who was trying to save Davis from arrest; and then the CIA paid blood money to finally extract Davis out of the country. Sovereignty? What sovereignty? **

Strategic ports

There’s frantic spin in the US especially among the right that Pakistan must be taught a lesson because it “harbors terrorists”. The mighty conceptual leap would be for these righteous, misinformed, armchair warriors to advocate teaching China a lesson.

Gwadar is an ultra-strategic deepwater port in the Arabian Sea, in Pakistani Balochistan, not far from the Iranian border and only 520 km away from the hyper-strategic Strait of Hormuz. Beijing financed close to 80 per cent of the construction of the port via the China Harbor Engineering Company Group. The port is currently managed by Singapore. The lease will end soon - and it will go to China.

Islamabad now wants the Chinese to build a naval base at Gwadar. That will be a monster geopolitical earthquake in a crucial node of “Pipelineistan” as well as the New Great Game in Eurasia.

Sleepy (for now) Gwadar has been building up for years as the key node of the IP (Iran-Pakistan) pipeline, which used to be the IPI (Iran-Pakistan-India) or “peace” pipeline, before New Delhi got cold feet. For Washington, the prospect of a steel umbilical cord linking Iran and Pakistan has always been anathema.

What Washington wants - and has wanted badly since the Bill Clinton years - is the TAP (Trans-Afghan) pipeline, which then became TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India). Even millennial rocks in the Hindu Kush know TAP or TAPI will only be built when the war is over in Afghanistan, with the Taliban an inevitable part of the government.

In this ongoing, epic IP (or IPI) versus TAP (or TAPI) battle, what is never mentioned is that the winner after all may be… China.

New Delhi knows a pipeline crossing Afghanistan is, well, a pipe dream. But still it has not committed itself to IPI - in part because of relentless Washington pressure, in part because it does not trust Pakistan.

China, on the other hand, has already proposed itself for an IP expansion. This means that starting at Gwadar, another pipeline would be built, by the Chinese of course, crossing Balochistan and then following the Karakoram highway northwards all the way to Xinjiang, China’s Far West.

Those who have already traveled the spectacular, 1,400 km-long Karakoram highway from Kashgar in Xinjiang, Western China, via the Khunjerab pass to, of all places, Abbottabad in Pakistan, know it for what it is - a graphic example of strategic Sino-Pak collaboration. Further on down the road, Beijing engineering will connect the Karakoram highway with a railway across Balochistan towards Gwadar.

Pakistanis involved with the development of Gwadar love to bill it as the new Dubai. Well, it might as well become Western Hong Kong.

**No wonder Beijing’s strategic analysts are tasting what could be the geopolitical equivalent of the finest shark-fin soup; the Chinese Navy positioned at the heart of the Arabian Sea, a stone’s throw from the Persian Gulf; a great deal of its Middle East oil imports shipped to nearby Gwadar - and then by pipeline or railway all the way to Kashgar; and the Chinese economy profiting from extra gas supplied by Iran and, in a near future, Qatar.
**
Keep on truckin’

It’s not only China possibly winning a crucial “Pipelineistan” chapter plus an Arabian Sea base to add to its “string of pearls” network. In terms of its AfPak vulnerability, Washington may be contemplating a triple X defeat.

For obvious reasons the Pentagon cannot use Chinese or Iranian seaports to supply no less than 100,000 US troops, 50,000 NATO troops and over 100,000 private contractors in Afghanistan - legions of mercenaries included - which dabble in over 400 military bases all across the country. Nearly 80 per cent of this monstrous quantity of supplies transit through Pakistan. And that means, essentially, Karachi.

So one cannot imagine the “kinetic military action” (White House copyright) in AfPak without a non-stop serpent of trucks leaving Karachi and entering Pakistan via Torkham or Chaman every single day.

**All the stuff Kabul - and the immense Bagram Air Base close by - needs goes through Torkham, at the end of the fabled Khyber Pass. All the stuff Kandahar needs goes through Chaman, in Pakistani Balochistan, not far from Quetta, where Mullah Omar theoretically lives when he’s not being pronounced dead by the Pentagon. **

The Pentagon of course could rely on alternative routes such as the interminable Northern Distribution Network (NDN) from Riga in Latvia to Termez in Uzbekistan, which connects via a bridge over the Oxus to Afghanistan. But NDN is not only long but also impractical; it does not allow too much cargo; and the Uzbeks forbid the transport of lethal weapons.

As for the Manas base in Kyrgyzstan, that’s only for troops coming in and out, and for storage of jet fuel.

The bottom line is that Islamabad knows the Pentagon simply cannot conduct the AfPak war without the Karachi-Torkham (300 trucks/tankers a day) and Karachi-Chaman (200 trucks/tankers a day) routes delivering like clockwork.

So if you break the balls of the Islamabad establishment to a tipping point and Taliban networks will have a free hand at attacking US/NATO convoys to Kingdom Come. Compare it with Beijing acknowledging Pakistan’s “contribution and sacrifices in the war against terrorism”.

On message

Beijing actively helped Islamabad’s nuclear weapons program. Next August, China will launch a satellite into orbit for Pakistan. Roughly 75 per cent of Pakistan’s weapons are made in China. Soon 260 Chinese fighter jets will become the core of the Pakistani Air Force.

Even before Beijing delivered the message that Pakistan’s sovereignty shouldn’t be messed about, the Pakistani military had already delivered their own message.

It concerned that most photographed rotor of the stealth Black Hawk helicopter that crashed beside Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad. The Pakistanis threatened they would let the Chinese tinker with it - and that would certainly yield some ace reverse engineering.

It didn’t happen. But still they didn’t get the message in a Washington whose leeway over Islamabad is a strategic rent that goes basically to Pakistan’s military. If the US congress would cut it - threats abound - there’s no question Beijing would be delighted to make up the difference.

Washington may still have a sterling opportunity to get the message next month, when the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) meets in Astana, Kazakhstan. There’s a strong possibility that Pakistan may be enthroned as a full member, upgraded from its current status of observer.

**This means, in practice, Pakistan as a member of the still embryonic Asian answer to NATO. An attack on any NATO member is an attack on them all, according to its charter. The same would apply to the SCO. Ladies and gentlemen, draw your conclusions - and start dancing to the sound of the Sino-Pak shuffle. **

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times . His latest book is Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at [email protected]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

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Re: China to U.S.: "Any Attack on Pakistan Would be Construed as an Attack on China

Good objective article. Had it been up to USA, they would have put Pakistan under sanctions to eye ball level.

Two back-to-back visits first to China and then Russia have touched some very raw nerves in the USA.

Believe me, we don't need USA to progress and prosper. We just need some massive internal cleansing. I see a very bright future for Pakistan, Insha Allah.

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Re: China to U.S.: "Any Attack on Pakistan Would be Construed as an Attack on China

Yes these are tough times, if we somehow manage to go through unscathed inshaAllah future will be much better

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Re: China to U.S.: "Any Attack on Pakistan Would be Construed as an Attack on China

The a$$wipe simply don't get it that there is no such thing as aid shade... This is the same focking country that took our money and kept our F16s and these netwits talk about aid... Yea all this aid shade is because the a$$wipes have too much love for us bad bad pakis...

WASHINGTON:

Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani’s visit to China, which he declared Pakistan’s best friend, makes it harder to sell an angry US public on aid to Islamabad, a key US senator said Tuesday. :D [yeah shove it pal no one is forcing ya]

“Frankly, I’m getting tired of it, and I think Americans are getting tired of it as far as shovelling money in there at people who just flat don’t like us,” said Idaho Republican Senator James Risch.
Continued aid to Pakistan, Risch argued, was “a hard sell to the American people” when cash-strapped Washington sends assistance to Islamabad, only to see “the head of Pakistan go to China and… stand up and say ‘you’re our best friend.’”

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Re: China to U.S.: "Any Attack on Pakistan Would be Construed as an Attack on China

its all about access to resources and passage of those resources folks, and these resources are the central asian fuel resources.
had pakistan and afghanistan etc had their act together, they would realize that they have a geographical lottery ticket that won big time and would use that to better their populations. and by getting their act together, i dont just mean the leaders, i mean the population as well.

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Re: China to U.S.: "Any Attack on Pakistan Would be Construed as an Attack on China

^^ At the moment it is more like massive curse than geopolitical lottery, LOL.

But you are right.

I think education (and by that I don't just mean going to school and passing exams), discipline and sense of duty can do wonders.

We can play our part at individual level and educate others at the very least.

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Re: China to U.S.: "Any Attack on Pakistan Would be Construed as an Attack on China

Even if Pakistan is fixed, there is still no hope for afghanistan as the civil society has really fled afghanistan. To make anything of Afghanistan, Pakistan would eventually have to put its foot down and I hope it is done in the right way, but first Pakistan needs good leadership itself.

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Re: China to U.S.: "Any Attack on Pakistan Would be Construed as an Attack on China

The possibility of attacking Pakistan conventionally became unfeasible the day we acquired the nukes. Thus, the only way to attack Pakistan was by (unconventional) asymmetrical warfare, such as what we are seeing today on our Western borders. They want to disable our nuclear capability - I've been repeating this for a decade. And now that they've expanded the Afghan War in to Pakistan, their media is all over the possibility that Pakistan's nukes may end up in terrorist hands (as if it was a pack of peanuts laying on the ground). Obama said it himself in 2007 that he would sequester Pakistan's nukes forcefully if need be.
Forget Gilani's visit, the current government since stepping into office has significantly worsened ties with the Chinese.

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Re: China to U.S.: "Any Attack on Pakistan Would be Construed as an Attack on China

cheeni

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Re: China to U.S.: "Any Attack on Pakistan Would be Construed as an Attack on China

You make valid points they want to make pakistan a toothless tiger.

The reason for this is their main target is china they want to contain China and the big weapon they want to use against china is India. The American plan is to make pakistan so weak India will not focus on pakistan any more and concentrate fully on China.

this plan was made long time ago since veitnam war they want to encircle china using japan, korea on one side and india on other and political issues like tibet and taiwan as tools all against china.

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Re: China to U.S.: "Any Attack on Pakistan Would be Construed as an Attack on China

If this is true then you need to agree that Saudi Arab/ UAE are bigger enemies of Pakistan than India. Actually, you would also agree that we are own enemy for supporting the fasadi kharijis on our Western border.