As #US plays off #India & #China, it risks losing #nuclear-armed #Pakistan. Pakistan is nervous about the impact closer ties between #Delhi & #Washington will have on its ability to defend itself against India. #Biden #Modi #ImranKhan #CPEC
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/poli...&utm_medium=share_widget&utm_campaign=3122426 via @scmpnews
A month after Joe Biden assumed the US presidency, Pakistan is increasingly concerned that the direction of its future relationship with the United States could be determined by Washington’s competition with China and the role that neighbouring nemesis India might play in it.
Since assuming power on January 20, Biden’s administration has placed great emphasis on strengthening the role of the Quadrilateral Alliance comprising the US and its key allies in the Indo-Pacific geopolitical theatre: Japan, Australia and India.
Building a “stronger regional architecture” under the umbrella of the Quad to counter China’s expanding role in the Indo-Pacific has figured prominently in US government readouts about recent conversations between the US secretaries of state and defence and their Indian counterparts, as well as for Biden’s video conference with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on February 8.
As China’s close ally and India’s historical enemy, “Islamabad will want to avoid getting in the crosshairs of US-China competition”, said Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistan ambassador to the US, United Nations and Britain. “And while it seeks an improved relationship with the US, it is obvious to Islamabad that Pakistan’s strategic future lies with China.”
On the other hand, Pakistan has lost the priority billing in US foreign policy for the first time since the September 11 al-Qaeda attacks because the war on terrorism no longer drives Washington’s international agenda.
With the US withdrawing its forces from Afghanistan and war zones in the Middle East, it has been supplanted by great power competition with China and Russia.
Pakistan has felt the impact of this policy shift since 2018, when the Donald Trump administration imposed punitive tariffs on Beijing and launched a diplomatic campaign against the Belt and Road Initiative.
Moeed Yusuf, Prime Minister Imran Khan’s national security adviser, has repeatedly voiced Pakistan’s discomfort at being portrayed as a spoiler by the US as it seeks to persuade India to abandon its traditional foreign policy of non-alignment and join forces against China.
“Pakistan wants bilateral US-Pak relations that are not clouded by hyphenating the relationship with US policy towards other countries in the region,” Yusuf said in a speech in Islamabad on January 22.
Islamabad has been under pressure from the US to cut down the scale of the estimated US$60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).
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The #Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth. #SriLankan Writer Michael Ondaatje says “In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.” And the debt-trap narrative is just that: a lie, and a powerful one. #Hambantota #CPEC #SriLanka #Pakistan #China
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/02/china-debt-trap-diplomacy/617953/
Seen this way, China’s internationalization—as laid out in programs such as the Belt and Road Initiative—is not simply a pursuit of geopolitical influence but also, in some tellings, a weapon. Once a country is weighed down by Chinese loans, like a hapless gambler who borrows from the Mafia, it is Beijing’s puppet and in danger of losing a limb.
The prime example of this is the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota. As the story goes, Beijing pushed Sri Lanka into borrowing money from Chinese banks to pay for the project, which had no prospect of commercial success. Onerous terms and feeble revenues eventually pushed Sri Lanka into default, at which point Beijing demanded the port as collateral, forcing the Sri Lankan government to surrender control to a Chinese firm.
The Trump administration pointed to Hambantota to warn of China’s strategic use of debt: In 2018, former Vice President Mike Pence called it “debt-trap diplomacy”—a phrase he used through the last days of the administration—and evidence of China’s military ambitions. Last year, erstwhile Attorney General William Barr raised the case to argue that Beijing is “loading poor countries up with debt, refusing to renegotiate terms, and then taking control of the infrastructure itself.”
As Michael Ondaatje, one of Sri Lanka’s greatest chroniclers, once said, “In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.” And the debt-trap narrative is just that: a lie, and a powerful one.
Our research shows that Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country, much less the port of Hambantota. A Chinese company’s acquisition of a majority stake in the port was a cautionary tale, but it’s not the one we’ve often heard. With a new administration in Washington, the truth about the widely, perhaps willfully, misunderstood case of Hambantota Port is long overdue.
The city of Hambantota lies at the southern tip of Sri Lanka, a few nautical miles from the busy Indian Ocean shipping lane that accounts for nearly all of the ocean-borne trade between Asia and Europe, and more than 80 percent of ocean-borne global trade. When a Chinese firm snagged the contract to build the city’s port, it was stepping into an ongoing Western competition, though one the United States had largely abandoned.
It was the Canadian International Development Agency—not China—that financed Canada’s leading engineering and construction firm, SNC-Lavalin, to carry out a feasibility study for the port. We obtained more than 1,000 pages of documents detailing this effort through a Freedom of Information Act request. The study, concluded in 2003, confirmed that building the port at Hambantota was feasible, and supporting documents show that the Canadians’ greatest fear was losing the project to European competitors. SNC-Lavalin recommended that it be undertaken through a joint-venture agreement between the Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) and a “private consortium” on a build-own-operate-transfer basis, a type of project in which a single company receives a contract to undertake all the steps required to get such a port up and running, and then gets to operate it when it is.
The Canadian project failed to move forward, mostly because of the vicissitudes of Sri Lankan politics. But the plan to build a port in Hambantota gained traction during the rule of the Rajapaksas—Mahinda Rajapaksa, who served as president from 2005 through 2015, and his brother Gotabaya, the current president and former minister of defense—who grew up in Hambantota. They promised to bring big ships to the region, a call that gained urgency after the devastating 2004 tsunami pulverized Sri Lanka’s coast and the local economy.
www.riazhaq.com
