China
An Uninformed Debate on China
Thomas Barnett on Monday posted on his blog a highly critical and utterly errant response to Andrew Krepinevich’s Saturday op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. If you haven’t yet done so, the op-ed is worth reading. Krepinevich draws attention to China’s ongoing military modernization—in particular, its anti-access/area denial capabilities—and argues that Beijing’s goal is to “Finlandize” the countries of the Western Pacific. This is, apparently, an argument that Barnett simply won’t countenance, and his criticism oddly sacrifices good sense in favor of needless hostility. Barnett’s criticism is so problematic that it’s difficult to know where to begin, but to respond to some of his points:
Of course, we might outspend everybody by gajillions and yet our stuff is sooooooo easy to counter, but China is going to pull off this amazing collection of high-tech hijinks the very first time and it’ll be so amazingly hard to counter.
First of all, straight-up U.S.-China defense spending comparisons are useless. They do not take into account the fact that the U.S. and China have different responsibilities—China’s are local, while America’s are global. Such comparisons also ignore, for example, that labor is cheaper in China. American soldiers get paid much more than do their Chinese counterparts—and that does not necessarily have any implications for the relative quality of those soldiers.
Secondly, “our stuff” is not “sooooooo easy to counter.” America has dominated the high seas since the end of World War II and, at present, continues to do so. China, though, has launched a concerted, fifteen-year effort to figure out how to counter what Jan van Tol calls the “American way of war.” Why Barnett has so much trouble believing that a country as industrious as China could be successful in this effort is a mystery to me.
Third, Krepinevich nowhere in his article argues that China’s new capabilities will “be so amazingly hard to counter.” Still, Barnett’s dismissal of the potential threat of those capabilities is odd. The United States Navy has never been faced with the threat soon to be posed by anti-ship ballistic missiles—why should the Pentagon be expected to have an immediate solution to the problem? Surely Barnett is generally familiar with the complexity of missile defense. Surely he is aware of China’s aggressive buildup of increasingly accurate ballistic and cruise missiles. Maybe he is aware of the difficulty coalition forces had countering the Scud missile threat during the first Gulf war. So why is he so dismissive of China’s missile forces, which in many ways are the backbone of the military threat Beijing poses?
Who’s Going to Win in Afghanistan? China.
According to a recent CRS report, China’s influence in Afghanistan is steadily increasing. Whether or not that turns out to be a good thing for the United States depends on whether Washington follows through on its recently-reaffirmed commitment to maintain a strategic partnership with Afghanistan post-2011.
The extent of China’s economic engagement in Afghanistan is by now well known. Since 2002, China has pledged nearly $1 billion in aid to Afghanistan (though only a fraction of it has been disbursed, and it remains modest sum compared to the U.S., UK, Japanese, and Canadian contributions). In 2008, a state-owned Chinese firm provided the largest single foreign direct investment in Afghanistan, dropping $3.5 billion to develop the Aynak copper field in Logar province. And despite the continuing security concerns and infrastructure challenges that have hampered progress at Aynak—the ambitious proposal also called for the construction of a freight railway, a power plant, housing, a mosque, and a hospital—China remains in the running to develop the Hajigak iron ore deposit in Bamiyan province, west of Kabul.
Of late, Beijing has launched a charm offensive in Afghanistan, having no doubt sensed, as with most other states in the region, that the time to begin shaping Kabul’s post-2011 regional alignments is now. Thus, during his March trip to Beijing, Afghan president Hamid Karzai was treated to meetings with Chinese president Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiabao, and Wu Bangguo, chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. In the course of the visit, Karzai and his Chinese hosts signed agreements on expanding economic cooperation, ensuring favorable tariffs on Afghan exports, and creating scholarships for technical training programs across a range of critical fields: commerce, communications, education, health, economics, and counternarcotics.
According to the CRS report, China may now be prepared to expand its engagement in Afghanistan into the realm of security. The report hinted that within the last six months there had been signs that the PRC could be persuaded to deploy PLA forces to Afghanistan:
“Some diplomats in Washington, DC, indicated to CRS in November 2009 that, should President Obama ask for China to contribute People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces, even in a non-combat role, to Afghanistan, China might agree to that request.”
China has already made some very limited contributions to the training of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). In the fall of 2009, the PRC launched a mine-clearing training course for officers from the ANSF and the Iraqi Security Forces at the PLA’s University of Science and Technology in Nanjing. In March, Xinhua reported that Defense Minister Liang Guanglie, following meetings with his Afghan counterpart, Adbul Rahim Wardak, pledged that the “Chinese military will continue assistance to the Afghan National Army(ANA) to improve their capacity of safeguarding national sovereignty, territorial integrity and domestic stability.” What’s more, reports have suggested that a senior PLA official may have discussed with Karzai the possibility of training and equipping the ANSF once coalition forces depart Afghanistan.
Afghanistan’s Regional Context
In an interview on Monday with the Wall Street Journal, General Stanley McChrystal provided some commentary on the regional dynamics which stand to affect U.S. efforts in Afghanistan:
“We get overly fixated sometimes on al Qaeda, but the reality is there are regional issues here that are potentially more important than that and so that needs to be put as one of the key points.”
This was encouraging observation on the part of the ISAF commander, given that the competition among regional players to exert influence in Afghanistan will only become more intense as the United States’ 2011 drawdown date approaches. McChrystal went on:
“Everything in the region affects everybody else. You know it’s like in the solar system: Each planet actually does gravitational pull on all the others. Pakistan is clearly affected by a number of actors, India being large. And Afghanistan is affected by a huge number of actors.
I think the better we can make India and Pakistan relations, the better it is for everyone, particularly a relatively weak nation right now like Afghanistan because as those two significant nations have friction sometimes, it can affect Afghanistan in ways that are just huge. So I think it’s really important that the transparency and the trust with India be part of that calculation. And clearly the Pakistanis are worried about Indian activities inside Afghanistan and sometimes there’s a lot of misperception associated with those, so I think clarity there is essential.”
Reducing India-Pakistan tensions in the near-term may indeed allow the Pakistani military to feel more comfortable in shifting forces from its eastern flank to combat insurgents just inside its border with Afghanistan. We have seen this phenomenon in action, with the redeployment of more than 100,000 forces from Pakistan’s Indian to Afghan border (as reported in the Pentagon’s biannual report to Congress on progress toward security and stability in Afghanistan), and the Pakistani army’s continuing operations in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
But in truth, there is little India — or the United States, for that matter — can do to dissuade Pakistan’s national security establishment that Afghanistan remains a critical source of “strategic depth,” or that India’s engagement in the country — which has taken the form of a broad but low-profile “soft power” campaign — is anything other than an effort to encircle Pakistan. At the same time, India — whose objectives in Afghanistan have been clear and, as Dan Twining noted recently, coincide closely with those of the U.S. — should not be expected to reduce its presence in Afghanistan simply to mollify its rival.
