NAWAZ OUSTER PRELUDE TO GHQ-CHINA ALIGNMENT

Pakistan army is convinced that Beijing has shed any earlier notions of neutrality between New Delhi and Islamabad, and has become fully aligned with Pakistan in practice.

The j udicial coup against Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan is the prelude to the end of Pakistan’s own version of “non-alignment” and the start of a process of “alignment”, according to analysts based in the Middle East who are monitoring developments in South Asia. These analysts had earlier drawn attention to GHQ Rawalpindi’s objective of removing Sharif through a Pakistan Supreme Court verdict that would disqualify him ( Gen Raheel Sharif plans judicial coup against Nawaz, The Sunday Guardian, 6 November 2016). A key reason behind Sharif ’s removal was the conclusion of GHQ Rawalpindi that the earlier policy of non-alignment between Beijing and Washington, which the Pakistan military had been following since the mid-1970s, needed to be jettisoned in favour of a policy of an exclusivein-practice alignment with China.

Since George W. Bush broadened the US “War on Terror” in 2003 by invading Iraq, much of the officer cadre of the Pakistan army had (according to Middle East- based analysts) accepted the Wahhabi view that the campaign against Saddam Hussein was, at the core, a war against the global Muslim community. Resentment against the US military had been building up within the officer ranks of the army since the 2001 temporary takedown of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Pashtun of- ficers, in particular, had chafed at what they saw as compromises being made by then military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf to US commands that were not even thinly cloaked as “requests”. Despite the reality that Musharraf only superficially obeyed Washington’s commands and, in fact, was able to rescue much of the Taliban-Al Qaeda coalition from the US military, did not assuage such sentiments, as the reality of “verbal compliance and substantive noncompliance” was known only to a few trusted members of the higher ranks of the Pakistan military, while the lower and middle ranks took their cue from the barrage of reports in Urdu, Punjabi and Pashto media about Musharraf’s “betrayal” of the cause of the Afghan jihad. These vituperative anti-US outpourings were tolerated, and indeed encouraged by Musharraf on the grounds that “freedom of the press” needed to be respected by the “democratic dictator” that his admirers within the White House and the Pentagon styled him as. Of course, such reports would also go to show that the Pakistan military establishment was cooperating with US diktats, when in fact the reverse was the case.

During 2006-2009, linkages between GHQ Rawalpindi and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) multiplied on a scale unprecedented in past years. The 2008 financial collapse across both sides of the Atlantic discredited the NATO