Over the weekend, we were greeted with news that materials from the U.S. stealth helicopter left behind at the compound in Abottabad, Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden was located and killed on May 2, 2011, had been shared with officials from the People’s Republic of China. This should not surprise or terribly upset us. Stealth materials and avionics from U.S. aircraft have fallen into Chinese hands before, most recently when a U.S. Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane collided with a People’s Liberation Navy fighter and landed on Hainan Island. We regularly hear accusations that Chinese computer hackers have used cyber means to purloin U.S. military technology. However, to understand this latest accusation of Pakistani acquiescence to Chinese interests requires not a primer in technology but rather a bit of a history lesson. Like no other country on the planet, Pakistan is connected to the United States and China. It is hardly an enviable position.
True, ties between China and Pakistan are close. Beijing and Islamabad have held a lasting relationship for decades, and both countries have engaged in hostilities with their shared neighbor, India. Pakistan’s arsenal has long been supplied with quantity from China and quality from the United States. F-16s from Fort Worth have flown alongside MiG copies and derivatives from Shenyang since the 1980s. This has been by necessity, as the Pakistanis have not held an assured supply of armaments it can afford from any country but China. In his autobiography, pilot Chuck Yeager discussed his time as a military adviser to the Pakistan Air Force, figuring out how to arm Communist Chinese MiG copies with American air-to-air missiles in the 1960s, fusing quantity with quality.
Pakistan’s geopolitical juxtaposition vis-à-vis what are the two most powerful countries on the planet is no doubt complicated. It cooperates to some degree with the United States on its counter-insurgency and counter-terror activities (although collaboration on intelligence matters is clearly strained) but that cooperation has increasingly been viewed as a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty. China’s position is a different one. The two countries work together on military technology and Beijing has poured money into a new deep-water port at Gwadar, less than a day’s sail from the Straits of Hormuz. Regardless of leadership in Islamabad, either military junta or democratically elected government, it appears that China feels little of the strain that the United States experiences in its dealings with Pakistan.
Why? Allow me to put it bluntly. For most of Pakistan’s history as an independent state, which stretches back to 1947, the United States has been rather aloof regarding the plight of Pakistan. I would dare say it has been rather a fair weather friend. When the CIA needed a base for its U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union, Peshawar sufficed and when Charlie Wilson began his campaign to arm the Afghani Mujahedeen in the 1980s, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, then president of Pakistan, became a close ally. U.S. support for Pakistan in its three wars with India – 1947, 1965 and 1971 – was inconsiderable and its criticism of Pakistani nuclear ambitions consistent.
Today, Pakistan is in the odd position of keeping two major powers pleased while maintaining its strategic integrity against the overwhelming economic and military power of India. When the heretofore unknown stealth helicopter parts were found on the bin Laden compound, the world’s aviation-watching community observed with great curiosity. America’s special operations forces penetrated Pakistan’s air defense network (which is presumably directed primarily at India) thanks to this remarkable machine. When it crash-landed on the compound wall, the demolition job left behind some interesting bits and pieces. Annoyed with the United States, the Pakistanis, it appears, shared access to some of those pieces with their Chinese allies. How much of a setback this is for the U.S. military is unknown, but we certainly can’t be terribly surprised. We have to remember that Pakistan was behaving in its own interest, not the interests we Americans project upon it.
Christopher Bronk is the Baker Institute fellow in information technology policy. He previously served as a career diplomat with the United States Department of State on assignments both overseas and in Washington, D.C.