The U.S. needs Pakistan more than ever

Farhan Bokhari

The recent U.S. sanctions targeting Chinese companies for suspected supply of components to Pakistan’s ballistic missile program were more of a knee-jerk reaction than a well-considered step to curb proliferation.

The decision must be seen within the broader context of America’s policies in the Indo-Pacific region, where a Washington-led coalition stands at odds with China. Consequently, the U.S. targeting of Pakistan partly appeared to be driven with an eye toward India — a member of that coalition.

India’s rivalries with China and Pakistan are more than six decades old. The U.S. has now found a reason to stand on New Delhi’s side through the unleashing of punitive measures against the two Asian powers.

But the targeting of China by the U.S. will do little to change the close ties between Beijing and Islamabad, cemented over a similar time period. The advancements made by China in the manufacturing of conventional weapons have incentivized Pakistan to turn to China as its main supplier of weapons.

China supplied 44% of all arms imported by Pakistan from 2000 to 2023, and the South Asian nation is the world’s biggest customer for Chinese weapons, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The period marked the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan following the 2001 terror attacks on New York.

Although Pakistan emerged during the first of those two decades as a major recipient of U.S. arms, it also relied on China as a trustworthy supplier of hardware. A long-term view of China’s technological advancements is clear to Pakistan’s policymakers. China’s success in manufacturing advanced aerial, ground and maritime military platforms has forced Pakistan to look toward Beijing as its prime supplier of hardware.

In the coming years, Pakistan is poised to receive much-sought-after kit such as its first batch of Chinese stealth fighter planes and at least eight new submarines. Additionally, Pakistan also plans to purchase more modern Chinese tanks, battleships and advanced aerial platforms.

Ultimately, the relationship must be viewed within the prism of two related factors: the past politics of America’s arms supplies to Pakistan, and China’s increasing economic footprint in Pakistan.

On the one hand, Pakistan’s leaders remain wary of ties with Washington, which hover between warmth and distance. Pakistan emerged in the 1980s as one of the world’s first U.S. allies to receive a batch of 40 prized F-16 fighter planes, when Islamabad became a conduit for the supply of U.S. weapons to anti-Soviet resistance fighters in Afghanistan.

Once Soviet forces withdrew, Pakistan was slapped with U.S. sanctions in the early 1990s on the pretext of the country’s advancement toward manufacturing nuclear weapons. The next batch of F-16 fighter planes was held back by Washington, and the money already paid by Islamabad for that deal was earmarked for payments for U.S. wheat shipments to Pakistan. It is a bitter lesson that Pakistan’s policymakers clearly remember.

On the other hand, the past decade has witnessed a robust expansion of China’s economic ties with Pakistan, as Beijing embarked toward investments under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). This involved the building of communications links between western China and Pakistan’s China-funded deep-sea port at Gwadar.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif shake hands at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on June 7.   © Reuters

The plan is geared toward providing the shortest distance between a part of China that remains landlocked and the Indian Ocean. The growing economic dimension of China’s ties with Pakistan has deepened Beijing’s stakes in the South Asian country, to the extent where China will just not retreat from the relationship.

While building up a Washington-led military alliance in the Indo-Pacific region, the U.S. still needs to keep close ties with Pakistan for a host of reasons. In spite of Pakistan’s security related internal challenges, the country’s location next to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and Islamist Iran gives it a pivotal position to support stabilization moves — notably in times of crisis.

The latest U.S. sanctions also draw attention to another facet of security across South Asia. The intent here was ostensibly the targeting of Pakistan’s missile program. Yet, the global community must carefully assess the danger of pushing Pakistan toward a deeper reliance on its nuclear and missile assets for guaranteeing its security. In recent years, Pakistan’s mounting economic pressures have caused a further closure of access to Western conventional arms, once purchased by the country in larger numbers.

Ultimately, it is essential to support Pakistan’s quest for enlarging its arsenal of conventional arms to boost Islamabad’s capacity. This will also help to reinforce Pakistan’s confidence of looking upon nuclear arms only as a highly potent deterrence and no more.

In the long run, India and Pakistan, the two nuclear-armed neighbors of South Asia and the world’s only two countries armed with nuclear weapons and a shared border, must tackle their disputes and stabilize their relationship. For now in a periodically tense South Asian region, punishing China and Pakistan hardly helps to lay the ground for long-term stability.

source : asia.nikkei