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asia policy So China, the ultimate realist state, and Pakistan, the ultimate security rentier state, have found mutual benefit from their decades of loosely coupled cooperation. And that looseness seems an essential part of the story to date, for there is no formal alliance between Islamabad and Beijing. This has permitted less than perfect harmony in Sino-Pakistani policies at numerous important milestones in the relationship, such as in 1971, when China stood by as Pakistan lost half its country in war. Small questions whether China would be with Pakistan in its hour of need and finds a consistent answer from 1971 to the present: “only up to a point” (p. 16). Yet the looseness of the Sino-Pakistani coupling is a mutual one. Pakistan does not treat China as a true ally either. For example, in September 2001, when Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf received the “with us or against us” ultimatum from Washington, he did not even pause to call Beijing (p. 131). In short, Pakistan and China have delivered in important ways for each other, but not in every way, and their priorities and preferences have never been perfectly aligned. That said, Small leaves no doubt in his book’s tantalizing epilogue that China’s growing power and ambitions are leading the country to play an increasingly active, rather than passive, role in its western periphery, especially in Pakistan and Afghanistan. This shift has been partly driven by—and has further exposed—the limits of depending on Pakistan’s military and intelligence services as a guarantor of China’s security against Islamist militants (p. 91). China’s far greater activism in and around Pakistan is already stirring a bit of discomfort among Pakistanis, who Small describes as missing the “free hand”—the loosely coupled relationship—they have long enjoyed (p. 162). In Afghanistan, for instance, Small sees that China does not share all of Pakistan’s priorities or perceptions. China cares more about stability and less about India. It is also less optimistic about prospects for engineering a deal with the Taliban (p. 162). These, I would suggest, are not minor differences. In my own interviews with Pakistani military officers, I have more than once heard a clear reluctance to allow Pakistan to fall too far under China’s sway. Their preference, as I take it, is less to be the junior partner in a tighter Sino-Pakistani alliance than to enjoy the generous affections of both Beijing and Washington for as long as possible. As a totemic example, the new JF-17 Thunder combat aircraft jointly produced with China is considered a serviceable option, but not one that can hold a candle to the U.S. F-16. And that is unlikely to change anytime soon. With this backdrop of potential Pakistani strategic disquiet and hedging comes Small’s observation of Islamabad’s striking leverage [ 154 ]
ook review roundtable • the china-pakistan axis over China’s ability to realize its grand trans-Asian schemes like the One Belt, One Road initiative. He writes that “the politics rely on Pakistan” (p. 179), pointing to the need for a political settlement in Afghanistan, Indo-Pakistani stability, and security within Pakistan itself. But if this is the case, if Beijing is truly so vulnerable to Pakistan’s vicissitudes, then we must ask whether China is in the process of trading a frustratingly inadequate but relatively cheap policy of passivity in its western periphery for a fabulously costly and spectacularly risky policy of overactivity, committing itself to an early down payment in Pakistan. Can Pakistan, despite its faults, offer a friendship to China that will bear the stresses likely to be imposed by a far more demanding and ambitious partner in the years to come? Small writes, “Beijing would prefer to have a longer list of candidates, but when it evaluates whom it can consistently expect to find in its camp, there is a single name that recurs” (p. 181). He notes that while China has some misgivings with Pakistan, “friendship, the one commodity that Pakistan can offer China more convincingly than any other country, matters far more to Beijing than it used to” (p. 181). I suspect even this assessment of what Pakistan can offer China will seem too rosy in hindsight. No matter, The China-Pakistan Axis offers readers ample material to reach their own conclusions on this and many other important issues. Sino-Pakistani Relations: Axis or Entente Cordiale? Feroz Hassan Khan Andrew Small’s book The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics traces the perplexing relationship between Beijing and Islamabad. Small’s geopolitical assessment is familiar, but his dubbing of relations between two important Asian states as an “axis” is somewhat mystifying. The notion of axis in international politics harkens back to World War II feroz hassan khan is a Lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He was formerly a Brigadier General in the Pakistan Army, where he served for 32 years. He can be reached at . [ 155 ]
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