The war clouds have receded following high-level United States diplomatic efforts and arm-twisting of Pakistani and Indian leaders. However, concerns over the outbreak of a conflict in South Asia have not completely disappeared, particularly in view of Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf's inability, if not unwillingness, to deliver on his promise to stop permanently terrorist incursions into Indian-administered Kashmir.

The India-Pakistan crisis has also highlighted once again the long shadow that Asia's rising superpower, China, casts on the Indian subcontinent, especially at the time of heightened tensions. In fact, Beijing has long been the most important player in the India-Pakistan-China triangular relationship.

Since the Sino-Indian border war of 1962, China has aligned itself with Pakistan and made heavy strategic and economic investments in that country to keep the common enemy, India, off-balance. Interestingly, China's attempts to improve ties with India since the early 1990s have been accompanied by parallel efforts to bolster Pakistani military's nuclear and conventional capabilities vis-a-vis India. It was the provision of a Chinese nuclear and missile shield to Pakistan during the late 1980s and 1990s that emboldened Islamabad to wage a "proxy war" in Kashmir without fear of Indian retaliation.

While a certain degree of tension in Kashmir and Pakistan's ability to pin down Indian armed forces on its western frontiers is seen as enhancing China's sense of security, neither an all-out India-Pakistan war nor Pakistan's collapse serves Beijing's grand strategic objectives. Concerned over the implications of an all-out war on China's southwestern borders post-September 11, Beijing has been keeping a close watch on the fast changing situation and has taken several diplomatic-military measures to safeguard its broader geostrategic-strategic interests in Asia.

At a conference on interaction and confidence building measures in Asia in Kazakhstan held in early June, Chinese President Jiang Zemin pressed Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to enter into direct talks with Musharraf to prevent the Kashmir conflict from exploding into a full-scale war. However, Vajpayee refused to budge. Later, in an interview with the Washington Post, the Indian premier complained that he saw "no basic change in China's policy. China continues to help Pakistan acquire weapons and equipment." Since most war-gaming exercises on the next India-Pakistan war end either in a nuclear exchange or in a Chinese military intervention to prevent the collapse of Beijing's most allied-ally in Asia, this article examines China's response to the recent India-Pakistan crisis and its likely response in the event of another war on the Indian subcontinent.

Beijing's response
Since the late 1990s, China had become increasingly concerned over the gradual shift in the regional balance of power in South Asia with the steady rise of India coupled with the growing India-US entente and the talk of "India as a counterweight to China" in Washington's policy circles, and Pakistan's gradual descent into the ranks of failed states.

Since the end of the Cold War, a politically dysfunctional and economically bankrupt Pakistan's flirtation with Islamic extremism and terrorism coupled with its nuclear and missile programs had alienated Washington. However, the September 11 attacks changed all that. Pakistan saw an opportunity to revive its past close relations with the US, shed its near pariah status, and enhance its economic and strategic position in relation to India by instantaneously becoming a frontline state in the international coalition fighting global terrorism. In return, Washington lifted sanctions and agreed to billions of dollars in aid and debt rescheduling. From Washington's perspective, courting Musharraf made geopolitical sense because Pakistan's military not only knew a great deal about the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, but also because any US military operation against Afghanistan could not be successful without the bases, logistics, personnel and airspace in neighboring Pakistan. In Beijing there were great expectations of a sharp downturn in India-US relations because in many ways what happens on the Indian subcontinent is unavoidably a zero-sum game and Pakistan's new relationship with the US did affect India negatively.

However, tensions between South Asia's two nuclear-armed rivals rose sharply after the terrorist attacks first on the Kashmir assembly in early October 2001 and then on the Indian parliament on December 13 last year. New Delhi responded by massing troops on the Pakistan border and warned of retaliatory, punitive military strikes against terrorist camps inside Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. While condemning terrorism, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said that "Kashmir is an issue left over by history and needs to be resolved through peaceful means".

A South Asia specialist from China's National Defense University, Wang Baofu, noted with satisfaction that under the new circumstances, "The United States, considering its own security interests, readjusted its policies toward South Asian countries and started paying more attention to the important role of Pakistan in the anti-terrorism war, therefore arousing the vigilance and jealousy of India." Wang criticized India for defining resistance activities in Kashmir as terrorism "by taking advantage of the US anti-terrorism war in Afghanistan, thus putting more pressure on Pakistan through the United States," and praised Musharraf for his "clear-cut attitude toward fighting against international terrorism".

Musharraf visited Beijing twice in less than a fortnight in December 2001-January 2002 for consultations with Jiang and Premier Zhu Rongji, while General Zhang Wannian, vice-chairman of China's Central Military Commission, met with General Muhammad Aziz Khan, chairman of Pakistan's Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, and was quoted as telling Khan, "For many years the militaries of our two nations have maintained exchanges and cooperation at the highest and all levels and in every field. This fully embodies the all weather friendship our nations maintain."

Zhang's reference to "cooperation … in every field" (meaning, nuclear and missile fields) was a thinly veiled warning to India to back off. Later, Beijing matched words with deeds by rushing two dozen F-7s jet fighters, nuclear and missile components and other weapon systems to shore up Pakistani defenses in the tense border face-off. People's Liberation Army (PLA) troops from the military regions of Chengdu and Lanzhou and their respective sub-divisions, the Xizang (Tibet) and Wulumuqi (Urumqi), along China's southern borders, were also put on alert in January to test their war preparedness should the conflict in the Indian subcontinent spill over onto Chinese soil.

Following Musharraf's January 12 speech in which he announced a crackdown on extremist organizations waging jihad from Pakistani territory, tensions somewhat subsided. The Chinese media claimed some credit for mediating between the two rivals, despite the Indian government's aversion to the dreaded "m" word: "Mediated by the United States, China, Britain and Russia, leaders of India and Pakistan recently expressed their desire to try to control the tense situation." Interestingly, this stance contradicted then Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh's statement during Zhu's visit to New Delhi in mid-January that "China has neither any intention, nor shall it play any mediatory role between India and Pakistan".

However, the May 14 terrorist attack on a military base in Jammu that killed 34 people, mostly women and children, once again highlighted the danger of escalation along the border where more than one million troops backed by heavy armor, warplanes and missiles are deployed. There was renewed tough talk of war, including nuclear war on both sides of the border. Beijing called for restraint from both New Delhi and Pakistan and emphasized the need for peaceful dialogue to settle outstanding disputes.

Chinese Defense Minister Chi Haotian also urged both countries to desist from a military conflict and not to threaten each other with nuclear weapons. Describing the US's diplomatic moves (that is, the dispatch of Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in early June) to defuse the India-Pakistan military stand-off as "too little too late", the state-run media accused Washington of showing "no genuine desire to resolve the Kashmir issue". It noted that Washington had clearly not taken the tensions very seriously when it went on with a 10-day joint military maneuver with India on May 16-26, thereby implying that the recent India-US joint military exercise had emboldened India to up the ante against Pakistan.

Concerned over the "one-sided nature of public appeals" to Musharraf to halt cross-border terrorism into Indian Kashmir from Washington, Moscow, London, Paris and Tokyo, Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan told US Secretary of State Colin Powell on May 27 that "the international community should encourage direct dialogue between India and Pakistan in a more balanced and fair manner, which is the most effective way to lead South Asia towards peace and stability". Apparently, the growing threat of nuclear war and the prospect of Pakistani nuclear weapons falling into the hands of Islamic terrorists have made Washington lean heavily on Islamabad. While publicly calling for restraint by both sides and claiming to be even-handed, China has not only continued to covertly side with its long-term ally but also militarily supported Pakistan. At the same time, Beijing repeatedly asked New Delhi to do more to end the military stand-off.

The nuclear connection
In a prepared testimony before the US Senate governmental affairs subcommittee in early June, John S Wolf, US assistant secretary of state for non-proliferation, revealed that "China recently provided Islamabad with missile-related technologies, which include dual-use missile-related items, raw materials and other accessories essential for missile manufacturing". In a sense, China's nuclear and missile assistance to Pakistan over the past two decades has now created the risk of a conventional conflict swiftly escalating into the world's first nuclear war.

Beijing has not only provided Islamabad with nuclear bombs, uranium and plants (all three Pakistani nuclear plants - Kahuta, Khushab and Chasma - have been built with Chinese assistance) but also their delivery systems: ready-to-launch M-9 (Ghaznavi/Hatf), M-11 (Shaheen), and a number of Dong Feng 21s (Ghauri) ballistic missiles. This cooperation has continued despite Beijing's growing concerns over the Talibanization of the Pakistani state and society. When Islamabad carried out a series of missile tests amid heightened tensions apparently to warn New Delhi to back off, the Indian government drew the international community's attention to Pakistani missiles' China connection. "We are not impressed by these missile antics, particularly when all that is demonstrated is borrowed or imported ability … the technology used in the missiles is not their own but clandestinely acquired from other countries," said a spokesperson of the Indian External Affairs Ministry.

More importantly, the Sino-Pakistani nuclear nexus seems to have introduced a new element of uncertainty and complexity into sub-continental strategic equations. While the attention of world leaders and the media is focused on the nightmarish scenario of a nuclear Armageddon in South Asia and large-scale mutual assured destruction leading to the death of 12 to 30 million people, strategic circles in Islamabad and New Delhi have been discussing the pros and cons of a short, limited nuclear war in Kashmir following intelligence reports about the forward deployment by the Pakistani military of low-yield (five kilotons or less) tactical nuclear weapons (TNWs). Such miniaturized battlefield nuclear weapons have a one-mile destruction radius and can be used effectively against large troop concentrations and advancing tank formations along the Line of Control in Kashmir. Tactical nukes can be launched over an unpopulated area from field artillery guns or aircraft to halt enemy advances in an effort to intimidate a numerically stronger enemy. Since the damage is localized or confined to a certain area, the danger of impacting on the civilian population is greatly reduced as compared to a strategic nuclear weapon of the Hiroshima kind, and therefore need not evoke massive retaliation by enemy forces. The mountainous terrain in Kashmir provides the perfect setting for their use. In addition to the US and Russia, only China is believed to have the largest stockpile of about 120 TNWs or "baby nukes", some of which may have been delivered to Pakistan following PLA deputy chief and military intelligence boss (arguably China's most important military figure) General Xiong Guangkai's visit to Islamabad in early March. The question then is: Would India, which does not possess TNWs but has strategic nuclear weapons in abundance, keep the nuclear conflict limited or escalate to the strategic level and respond with massive retaliation?

Some analysts attribute the recent lessening of tensions to the belated recognition in India's strategic circles that New Delhi cannot afford to dismiss Pakistan's repeated threats of using nuclear weapons as "mere posturing" or "bluffing" on Islamabad's part. Others believe that Indian strategic planners' tendency to discount the threat of nuclear escalation may well be based on some fundamentally erroneous assumptions:

That the United States would not allow Pakistan to be the first Islamic country (and the second nation after the US) to use nuclear weapons to settle a territorial dispute as it would mean the end of the non-proliferation regime and encourage other countries to go nuclear;

That the presence of US forces in Pakistan would be a constraining factor;

That the international community (the US, UK, China or the United Nations) would intervene in time to prevent such a catastrophe; and

That India could count on American and Israeli military support to seize and/or take out Pakistan's nuclear and missile infrastructure.

These assumptions seem to be based less on cold, hard-headed calculations of the strategic interests and influence of major powers (especially the US and China) and may well be a sign of wishful thinking on India's part. It is worth noting that new strategic and geopolitical realities emerging in Asia post-September 11 have put a question mark over Beijing's older certainties, assumptions and beliefs.

China's concerns
Much to Jiang and his politburo's chagrin, the US-led war on terrorism has developed in ways that could not have been foreseen, with potentially disastrous consequences for China's core strategic interests. A major unintended (and unsettling, from Beijing's standpoint) consequence has not only been to checkmate and roll back China's recent strategic expansion moves in Central, South and Southeast Asia, thereby severely constricting the strategic latitude that China has enjoyed post-Cold War, but also to tilt the regional balance of power decisively in Washington's favor within a short period.

The supposedly "brief" unipolar moment in history seems to be turning into a long-lasting imperial moment - Pax Americana par excellence. More importantly, recent developments show how tenuous Chinese power remains when compared to that of the United States. The Chinese believe that Russia, India and Japan have all been big winners in this, and that the United States is probably going to have a better relationship with all of them, leaving China out in the cold.

The fast-changing strategic scene not only undercuts Chinese ambitions to dominate Asia, but also hems in the one country in the world with the most demonstrable capacity to act independently of the United States. Not surprisingly, the beginning of 2002 saw Chinese leaders and generals shedding their earlier inhibitions about publicly expressing concern over the growing "southern discomfort" - the ever-expanding US military power and presence in southern Asia post-September 11. China's Chief of the General Staff, Fu Quanyou, has warned the US against using the war on terrorism to dominate global affairs by saying that "counter-terrorism should not be to used to practice hegemony". On an official visit in April in Iran, Jiang Zemin openly repudiated the US stance against the Iranian and Iraqi regimes, saying, "Our opinion [on terrorism] is not the same as the United States," while in Germany, he told the Welt am Sonntag, "We all want to fight terrorism. But the states involved in the fight against terror each have their own specific viewpoint."

China's initial optimism that new Sino-US-Pakistan triangular cooperation in the aftermath of September 11 would wean Washington away from New Delhi turned out to be wishful thinking as the Bush administration officials went out of their way to assure India that America's intensifying alliance with Pakistan would not come at India's expense. If anything, the current crisis has strengthened the American commitment to building stronger relations, including defense ties, with South Asia's superpower.

However, China does not want to see India raising its power, stature and profile regionally or internationally. Chinese strategists have long argued that China's pursuit of great power status is a historical right and perfectly legitimate, but India's pursuit of great power status is illegitimate, wrong, dangerous and a sign of hegemonic, imperial behavior. For its part, New Delhi has long accused Beijing of doing everything it can to undermine India's interests and in using its ties with other states to contain India. Beijing is also alarmed over the growing talk in right-wing policy circles in Washington and New Delhi of India as emerging as a counterweight to China on the one hand and the fragile, radical Islamic states of West Asia on the other.

Earlier, when President George W Bush unveiled his missile defense plan, New Delhi had responded far more positively than most US allies. Some Indian strategic thinkers even see in the emerging India-US quasi-alliance an opportunity for "payback" to China. As former Indian ambassador to Pakistan and Myanmar, G Parthasarthy, put it, "Whether it was the Bangladesh conflict of 1971, or in the Clinton-Jiang Declaration in the aftermath of our nuclear tests, China has never hesitated to use its leverage with the Americans to undermine our security."

Growing Chinese pressure on the Malacca Straits has already led to a strategic alignment between India and the United States, with their navies jointly patrolling the Straits. More significantly, India-US strategic engagement has scaled new heights with the announcement of a series of measures usually reserved for close US allies and friends: joint military exercises in Alaska that would improve India's high-altitude warfare capabilities in the Himalayan glaciers of northern Kashmir where it faces Pakistan and China; sale of military hardware including radars, aircraft engines and surveillance equipment to India; joint naval exercises and the training of India's special forces; and intelligence sharing and joint naval patrols between the Straits of Malacca and the Straits of Hormuz.

Washington also gave the green light for Israel to proceed with the sale of AWACS to India - something that was earlier denied to China for fear of enhancing Beijing's air surveillance and early warning capabilities in the Taiwan Straits. All these measures send an implicit signal to China of India's growing military prowess. A cover story in authoritative Beijing Review by China's noted South Asia specialists expressed concern over the US sale of arms to India which "enables it to become the first country to have close military relations with the world's two big powers - the United States and Russia". To make matters worse, in early May, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan, Beijing's other Asian rival, who also sees China representing a clear and future threat to its security, called for a broadening of Japan's security cooperation with India.

Many Chinese strategists believe that India is now using the war on terrorism as a pretext to use the military option to subdue Pakistan and/or to destabilize and dismember the country. Pakistan is the only country that stands up to India and thereby prevents Indian hegemony over the region, thus fulfilling the key objective of China's South Asia policy. As South Asia-watcher, Ehsan Ahrari, points out, "India may end up intensifying its own rivalry with China by remaining steadfast in its insistence that Musharraf kowtow to its demands, especially if China calculates that US-India ties are harming its own regional interests. China, though still concerned about the continued activism of Islamist groups in Pakistan and contiguous areas, is not at all willing to see the regional balance of power significantly tilt in favor of India."

Chinese strategists also worry about the destabilizing consequences of a prolonged US military presence in Pakistan and increased influence on the future of Sino-Pakistan ties, as well as on Pakistan's domestic stability. The US military presence in Pakistan could further sharpen the divide within the Pakistani military into pro-West and pro-Beijing factions, with China supporting the latter to regain the lost ground post-September. The pro-Beijing lobby in the Pakistani military is reportedly getting restive and waiting to strike if and when Musharraf falters. The pro-China faction within the Pakistani military could also join hands with the pro-Islamic fundamentalist faction or those who find Pakistan's loss of its strategic depth in Afghanistan for elusive gains and US military presence on their soil very hard to digest. The US arms sales to India and joint India-US military exercises may further sour China and Pakistan's willingness to assist Washington in its war on terrorism. War scenarios
It is said that each conflict simply prepares the ground for the next one or every war contains the seeds of another war. The Afghan war of the 1980s against the Soviet occupation culminated in the war of terrorism in 2001. Whether the war on terrorism will in turn lead to another war or a clash of civilizations or a nuclear jihad in South Asia, only time will tell. But what worries China more is the possibility that it could be drawn into a conflict, not between Pakistan and India per se, but between Pakistan and the US, with the latter using India as a surrogate. With the top al-Qaeda/Taliban leadership fleeing into Pakistan's wild west and Pakistani Kashmir, it is becoming increasingly clear that the war against Terrorism is zeroing in on Pakistan as the next battlefield.

Should the India-Pakistan conflict escalate into a nuclear one, neither the geopolitical nor the radioactive fallout will remain limited to South Asia. It could bring the US and Pakistan on a collision course, again with India acting as a US partner. Such a development would obviously present China with difficult choices. Open support for its most allied ally would jeopardize China's relations with the US and India. But non-intervention on Pakistan's behalf, however, could encourage India to solve "the Pakistan problem" once and for all with or without a nuclear exchange and thereby tilt the regional balance of power decisively in its favor.

An unrestrained Indian power would eventually threaten China's security along its soft underbelly - Tibet and Xinjiang. Should post-Musharraf Pakistan disintegrate or be taken over by Islamic extremists, a new level of instability will rock the region and increase tensions among Pakistan, India and China. Another dreadful scenario is one wherein Chinese-made Pakistani nuclear weapons fall into the hands of the US, Israel or even India in the event of a civil war should al-Qaeda/Taliban declare jihad against Pakistan - the weakest ally of the US anti-terrorism coalition. Such a scenario may lead to information regarding China's own nuclear program and the extent of help provided by Beijing to Islamabad. The scenario of Pakistan in splinters, with one piece becoming a radical Muslim state in possession of a nuclear weapon, can no longer be simply rejected as alarmist fantasy.

Difficult choices
These scenarios put Beijing on the horns of a dilemma. Some Chinese strategists see in the current South Asian crisis as an opportunity to recover lost ground and thwart India's ambitions to challenge China's economic and military primacy in Asia. Should another war between India and Pakistan break out, New Delhi's high hopes of an India-US alliance to counter China may never materialize, a welcome development from China's perspective. Some hawks in the PLA see China even benefiting from an India-Pakistani nuclear war. For example, at the time of the 1999 Kargil War, one Chinese military official reportedly told a Western diplomat that "should India and Pakistan destroy themselves in a nuclear war, there would be peace along China's south-western frontiers for at least three decades, and Beijing needs 20 to 30 years to consolidate its hold over restive Tibet and Xinjiang provinces." However, this remains a minority viewpoint as a nuclear war will have worldwide repercussions in terms of global economic depression, humanitarian crises, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and China's developmental priorities. The majority believes that Beijing should have absolutely minimum involvement in a situation where there can be no clear winners.

While recent lessening of tensions and the announcement of de-escalatory measures are welcome signs, the risk of another India-Pakistan war remains high because the jihadis and powerful sections of the Pakistani military establishment have openly expressed their anger over Musharraf's submission to the US diktat and may launch devastating strikes sooner rather than later, in turn forcing India to retaliate. While the Pakistanis are confident that in the event of a war with India, China would throw its weight behind Pakistan, diplomatically as well as militarily, the Indians believe that the Chinese would not do so for fear of India playing "the Taiwan and Tibet cards".

Interestingly, on May 31, the day Pakistan's new UN ambassador, Munir Akram, issued an explicit nuclear warning to India, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman denied a Times of India report that Jiang Zemin had assured a US Congressional delegation that China would not favor Pakistan in the existing tensions, and claimed that the report was "not based on facts". A Chinese South Asia analyst at Fudan University in Shanghai, Shen Dingli, added, "China needs to send a message: For my own security I will intervene." Though Beijing may not overtly intervene in a limited war, it will have to come to Pakistan's defense if the latter's very existence as a nation-state is threatened by India. Clearly, there is a great deal more to the Chinese role in South Asia than meets the eye.

In the final analysis, Beijing's response to the next India-Pakistan war will be shaped by its desire to protect Chinese national interests, no matter what the cost. And, geostrategic concerns require China to covertly side with Pakistan, while publicly calling for restraint by both sides and appearing to be even-handed. Even in the absence of a war, Pakistan hopes to continue to benefit not only from the intensifying Sino-Indian geopolitical rivalry in southern Asia but also from the coming showdown between China and the United States, which is likely to increase the significance of China's strategic ties with Pakistan.