New jets to be built in Pakistan as cooperation with China expands: NYT

new york/islamabad — Pakistani Air Force and Chinese officials are putting the final touches on a plan to expand Pakistan’s building of Chinese fighter jets, weaponry and other hardware, The New York Times reported in a long despatch claiming that Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was taking a “military turn”.

The despatch said that the newspaper had “reviewed” the confidential plan which it says also envisages the cooperation between China and Pakistan in space. “All those military projects were designated as part of China’s BRI, a $1 trillion chain of infrastructure development programmes stretching across some 70 countries, built and financed by Beijing,” NYTs’ correspondent Maria Abi-Habib wrote from Islamabad.

Pointing out that Chinese officials had insisted that the Belt and Road was purely an economic project with peaceful intent, the Times said, “But with its plan for Pakistan, China is for the first time explicitly tying a Belt and Road proposal to its military ambitions — and confirming the concerns of a host of nations who suspect the infrastructure initiative is really about helping China project armed might.

“As China’s strategically located and nuclear-armed neighbour, Pakistan has been the leading example of how the Chinese projects are being used to give Beijing both favour and leverage among its clients, correspondent Abi-Habib wrote.

Since the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, it was pointed out, Pakistan has been the programme’s

flagship site, with some $62 billion in projects planned in the CPEC. In the process, the despatch said, China has lent more and more money to Pakistan at a time of economic

desperation there, binding the two countries ever closer, as the chill in US-Pakistan relations deepened.

Even before the revelation of the new Chinese-Pakistani military cooperation, the said, some of China’s biggest projects in Pakistan had clear strategic implications, citing the Chinese-built seaport and special economic zone in Gwadar that gives China a quicker route to get goods to the Arabian Sea. “But it also gives Beijing a strategic card to play against India and the US if tensions worsen to the point of naval blockades as the two powers increasingly confront each other at sea,” the report said.

A less scrutinised component of BRI is the central role Pakistan plays in China’s Beidou satellite navigation system, it was pointed out. Pakistan is the only other country that has been granted access to the system’s military service, allowing more precise guidance for missiles, ships and aircraft.

“The cooperation is meant to be a blueprint for Beidou’s expansion to other Belt and Road nations, however, ostensibly ending its clients’ reliance on the American militaryrun GPS network that Chinese officials fear is monitored and manipulated by the US,” according to the despatch. “The focus of Belt and Road is on roads and bridges and ports, because those are the concrete construction projects that people can easily see. But it’s the technologies of the future and technologies of future security systems that could be the biggest security threat in the Belt and Road project,” Priscilla Moriuchi, the director of strategic threat development at Recorded Future, a cyber threat intelligence monitoring company based in Massachusetts, was quoted as saying. —