China-U.S. relationship called 'most important' in world


The relationship between China and the United States is "the most important" bilateral relationship in the world, a former Chinese foreign ministry official said Monday.
Victor Zhikai Gao, now the director of the Beijing Private Equity Association, told CNN's Christiane Amanpour that the United States should deal with Beijing "with respect" and not be "too abrasive."
"That's the minimum thing we can ask for, I believe," he said on the eve of talks between President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao.
Gao pointed out that China is now the United States' largest creditor nation, holding foreign reserves of more than $2 trillion, about two-thirds of which are assets that are denominated in U.S. dollars.
"China-U.S. relations are the most important bilateral relations in the world," Gao said.
Obama appears keen to put past U.S.-Chinese disagreements behind him as he seeks Chinese cooperation on a host of issues from the global economy and climate change to nuclear proliferation. He's also looking to China for leadership on how to deal with repressive regimes such as Myanmar and Sudan, both of which are friends of Beijing and major energy suppliers to China.
Critics of the U.S. president say he is downplaying what was once a central tenet of U.S. foreign policy, the promotion of human rights and democracy, in order to persuade China to help the United States achieve its foreign policy goals. But Obama insists America "will never waver in speaking up for the fundamental values that we hold dear."
Gao acknowledged global concern about China's human rights record, admitting the situation is not perfect.
"But if you look at today's human rights issues, and comparing that with what we had 30 years ago, 20 years ago, or 10 years ago, then China has made great improvements," he said.
Gao said China and the Chinese people are great admirers of America. But he said, "China's foreign policy is underlined by the principle of non-interference in each other's internal affairs. If it is only up to the United States to discuss human rights issues in China, this is unbalanced."
He also tried to reassure critics in the United States, some of whom have accused China of manipulating its currency to keep the cost of Chinese goods artificially low, about the impact of China's rapidly expanding economic power. By some estimates, China's economy will be the same size as the U.S. economy by 2025, though there will still be a huge gap in economic output per person.
"Let me make the record straight. Over the past few months since the outbreak of the financial crisis, China has continued to purchase Treasury bonds issued by the U.S. government, rather than reducing them in any way," he said.
"So I think the American people need to realize that China has applied a very steady hand and very responsible hand in dealing with issues involving the dollar."
Gao said China has no desire to be an enemy of the United States. "Both China and the United States need to give each other due respect and need to incentivize each other. And then we can work together towards a better peace and better world."

China Remains Skeptical of Iran Sanctions Push

China is pouring cold water on the Obama Administration's push for more sanctions on Iran if there's no progress in nuclear talks with Tehran this month. Beijing says dialogue, not new sanctions, is the way to go, casting doubt on Washington's ability to win U.N. Security Council endorsement for the new sanctions it hopes to impose as the penalty for Iran's refusal to engage positively with Western negotiation offers.
Wu Jianmin, a top foreign policy adviser to the leadership in Beijing, told journalists in New York on Thursday that China believes "that Iran should not possess the bomb, but it has the right to get peaceful nuclear energy."
"The Chinese are by nature very reluctant to [impose] sanctions because past experience shows they do not work," he added. "The best way is the dialogue."
Wu, a former ambassador to France, is a member of the Chinese Foreign Ministry's advisory group on policy and is regarded as one of Beijing's top foreign policy thinkers.
Another senior Chinese diplomat, Lv Fengding, added that Western nations need to "convince Iran that its best interest is not to possess nuclear weapons." But that cannot be done, he said, until "we look at the root cause: [Iranians] don't feel safe; they feel the need to protect themselves."
President Barack Obama has warned Tehran that if it fails to respond positively to the most recent Western offer of talks before the end of this month, it will face an escalation of sanctions. And Administration officials aren't expecting Iran to seriously engage.
The signals from Tehran have been mixed: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sept. 7 that talks on the nuclear issue were "finished." The following day, his government presented a package of new proposals aimed at resolving the dispute with the "P5+1" group, which features the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China) and Germany. But the proposals are long on generalities about global issues and short on specifics addressing concerns that Iran's nuclear-energy program will put within reach the means to build nuclear weapons.
U.S. officials now say Tehran is inching closer to having the capacity to build a bomb. "We have serious concerns that Iran is deliberately attempting, at a minimum, to preserve a nuclear-weapons option," U.S. Representative Glyn Davies told the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) yesterday. "Iran is now either very near or in possession already of sufficient low-enriched uranium to produce one nuclear weapon if the decision were made to further enrich it to weapons-grade."
Iran's current enrichment efforts are conducted under IAEA monitoring and intended to create low-enriched uranium suitable for reactor fuel but not for weapons. Although it has produced enough of that material to create fuel for a single nuclear bomb if it were reprocessed to a higher level of enrichment, doing so would require that Iran declare its intent by kicking out IAEA inspectors and reconfiguring its enrichment facilities, which would take a number of months. Creating the other elements of a deliverable nuclear weapon would take even longer. Still, the Obama Administration is eager to prevent Iran from accumulating the capacity for a "breakout" option, in which civilian nuclear infrastructure is quickly transformed for purposes of bomb production.
Yet the Obama Administration's threat of new sanctions carries little weight if such a move is opposed by veto-wielding permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, which include China and Russia. Beijing and Moscow have restrained previous sanctions efforts against Iran, and Wu's statements in New York suggest that China hasn't changed its mind.
"Americans are too impatient," the Chinese foreign policy adviser said. "We have to talk to the Iranians. This is the best way to solve our differences."

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Humanity's greatest achievement is not that we never stumble but that we always get up again when we do.

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US assistance to Pakistan and the controversies
The United States Congress has approved the Foreign Aid Bill 2009 that includes the 1.459 billion dollars per annum non-military assistance to Pakistan under the Kerry-Lugar Act. Three elements of assistance must be acknowledged at the outset to mitigate subsequent controversies that serve little purpose once aid has been approved and accepted.

First and foremost, most bilateral assistance, inclusive of US assistance, is inextricably linked to the achievement of the donor's foreign policy goals. The post-9/11 era clearly indicates the addition of military goals as yet another key element in extending assistance. This is especially so with respect to US assistance to South Asian countries, particularly Pakistan.

This policy has been endorsed by the European Union as well. One would, therefore, be profoundly naïve to assume or maintain that the non-military assistance is distinct from US military goals in the region. Thus irrespective of the clauses contained in the Kerry-Lugar Act if Pakistan cannot deliver on the ongoing war on terror then the likelihood of President Obama using his executive prerogative to delay or annul civilian assistance as well as military assistance becomes high.

Second, it is now fairly well-known that a substantial proportion of assistance earmarked for poor countries does not reach the poor of such countries. In this context, a study undertaken by a well-known NGO, namely Action Aid, has concluded that nearly half of total global aid is phantom aid, or aid that is not legitimately available to poor countries to fight poverty.

The countries extending the highest volume of real, as opposed to phantom aid, according to the report, included Ireland, Luxembourg, Sweden, Denmark and the UK, while countries with the highest share of phantom aid included the US and Australia. This is, however, unfortunate as the US is Pakistan's largest bilateral aid donor.

And, finally, there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that aid conditions imposed by the bilaterals, as well as by multilaterals, are simply not realistic. To give an example of a country that is credited with extending relatively high levels of real aid, the UK, the World Development Movement reported that the British government has been using aid money to pay British companies to push privatisation of water services to poor countries, even though it was not in their best interest.

Additionally, aid conditions tie the debtor government to purchase products/services from the donor countries alone. This, according to various studies, has led to a cut in the value of aid by as high as 25 to 40 percent because it obliges the debtor country to purchase uncompetitively priced products/services. Thus, the 1.459 billion dollars of US assistance to Pakistan must be viewed in the context of these well-known limitations to aid effectivity.

In Pakistan's context, the element of domestic corruption is considered an additional element that would limit aid's quality of being able to bring about an effect; and this accounts for allocation of a significant amount of money under the Kerry-Lugar Act for audit by US Agency for International Development - money that would not, obviously, be earmarked for direct poverty reduction projects.

A part of US assistance is also being diverted to provide further security to US personnel stationed in Pakistan given the rise of terrorist attacks in the country. However, these expenditure items can no longer be negotiated and therefore are no longer available to the country for poverty reduction.

However, one would hope that the government of Pakistan does engage itself in an exercise to prioritise infrastructure projects. Reports indicate that the US has prioritised country's energy sector and there are indications that Islamabad is considering offering shares in the energy sector to the Friends of Democratic Pakistan.

One would hope that this may prove more successful than the FoDP pledges that have yet to be disbursed; however what is disturbing is that the lead team in this endeavour is not reportedly the relevant ministry but a multilateral institution. While to many Pakistanis this is to be supported as it mitigates allegations of corruption against a minister or his staff yet this element would, no doubt, lead to money being diverted to the consultants of other countries and may also lead to procurement of more expensive goods from abroad.

What is critical, therefore, is to ensure good governance within the government, which would allow for our own highly trained people to undertake consultancies as well as international procurement at the lowest possible cost. Be that as it may, the value of ongoing projects indicates that roads and their development remains the largest recipient of foreign assistance while the deficient energy sector comes in second.

There is, therefore, clearly a need for the government to revisit the Musharraf-era priorities that have been acknowledged as lacking in good sense. One would hope that the government prepares a revised list of projects that allows for energy to be the major recipient of all assistance - a sector that has almost single-handed led to lower productivity and high unemployment levels in the past year and three quarters.

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Humanity's greatest achievement is not that we never stumble but that we always get up again when we do.

Pakistan's Other Problem Area: Baluchistan
When the world looks at Pakistan, its attention justifiably focuses on the rugged northern border with Afghanistan, a nexus of Taliban activity and the site of an ongoing multi-pronged campaign against the militants. Battling jihadism there is a pivotal plank in the Obama administration's plans to stabilize the war-ravaged region and eventually dial down America's military presence.
But in the shadow of this "Af-Pak" frontier, another conflict has grown new life in recent years and, according to experts, poses a possibly greater existential threat to the Pakistani state. The province of Baluchistan, situated along Pakistan's west and northwest borders with Iran and Afghanistan, comprises more than 40% of Pakistan's landmass but less than 5% of its people. Its unforgiving deserts nearly annihilated the armies of Alexander the Great as they marched home. The native Baluch, descendants of nomadic tribes who roamed these arid wastes, number around five million and have for years complained of marginalization and mistreatment, particularly at the hands of the Pakistani military.
Beneath their homeland's soil lies a treasure trove of natural gas and oil reserves, which, while largely untapped, yield revenues from which the Baluch feel excluded. Successive generations have waged armed rebellions against Pakistani rule — in 1948, 1953, through the 1960s and 70s, and now. According to analysts, continued abuses at the hands of security forces and Pakistan's shadowy intelligence agency, the ISI, have intensified separatist feeling to an unprecedented scale. "Baluch nationalism is more broad-based, is a more serious phenomenon than at any time in the past," says Selig Harrison, a leading authority on the Baluch and director of the Center for International Policy in Washington.
The dimensions of the Baluch struggle are made all the more complicated by the region's political geography. Around a million ethnic Baluch live on the other side of the border in Iran and there, too, have long agitated against a repressive state for greater freedoms. During Pakistan's most brutal crackdown on Baluch separatists in the 1970s — when civilians reportedly died in the thousands — Iran lent Pakistan logistical support, including helicopters. At the time, the two countries were allied together under the U.S.-led CENTO Cold War pact, but following Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979 relations changed, with Tehran's Shia establishment increasingly wary of their Sunni counterparts in the Pakistani military leadership. The Iranians loath the Afghan Taliban, who were created in part by elements within the Pakistani state. "There's an inherent set of tensions [between the two countries] based on their prior strategic choices," says Sameer Lalwani, a Pakistan watcher at the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think tank.
On Baluchistan, the cooperation of old has shifted to a more guarded mutual distrust. On Oct. 18, Jundullah, a Baluch militia based on Pakistani soil struck the Iranian border city of Pishin, killing 41, including a number of senior figures in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. A week later, Pakistani troops detained 11 Iranian agents who had infiltrated across the border, possibly in a mission aimed against Jundullah. They were eventually released, but the incidents spotlighted the uncomfortable place Baluchistan occupies in both Tehran and Islamabad's internal affairs — and their dealings with each other.
These tensions may balloon in the future as other regional powers expand their interests in Baluchistan as well. The presence of some 19 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the province has raised the prospect of significant outside investment, but it has only deepened Baluch anxieties of alienation. China has already set about securing access to Baluchistan's other rich veins of resources: it owns a controlling interest in the massive gold and copper mine at Saindak and has steered the building of a $1 billion blue water port at Gwadar, mostly using Chinese labor. The growing hub of Gwadar, which Islamabad has slated to become a special economic zone, is not only a focal point of Chinese strategic interests in southwest Asia, but also a source of contention for the Baluch, who have been almost entirely frozen out of its development and, as in elsewhere in the province, kept at arm's length by ethnic Punjabis and Sindhis arriving to do business here from other parts of Pakistan.
Baluch separatists claim that they never wanted to be part of Britain's partitioning of colonial India into the independent states of India and Pakistan and that they are the victims of an empire that barely ruled them. The border that splits Iranian and Pakistani Baluchistan was a line plotted in 1871 by a British colonial official, ceding territory to Iran's rulers in a bid to win Tehran's support against Czarist Russia. Now, the Baluch in Pakistan and Iran who fear independence may be out of reach campaign for expanded freedoms and guarantees to preserve their language and culture within the Pakistani and Iranian states. Others have taken up arms over the years. Suggestions made by some Pakistani officials linking Baluch separatism to the activities of the Taliban are wrong, say Harrison. Baluch nationalism has always been a secular project; its militant fronts warring with Pakistan, like the Baluch Liberation Army, descend from a tradition of Marxist-Leninist guerrillas that took root in the 1970s. Jundullah, though an avowedly Sunni group, articulates its identity as a rejection of the Shia clerics ruling Iran — a political act — rather than one born out any particular fervor.
When trying to discredit Baluch separatism, Islamabad often blames its regional rival, India, for abetting and influencing the rebels. Pakistan's wariness of India's hand in its affairs has only grown after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan saw Indian engagement there bloom — Pakistani officials say Indian consulates in the Afghan cities of Kandahar and Jalalabad are behind the destabilizing acts of subversion in Baluchistan. Baluch attacks are frequently followed by Pakistani accusations of Indian involvement, though Islamabad, which has a noted record of being a breeding ground for terrorists who make their way to India, has yet to show any evidence of Indian collusion. Earlier this month, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh rejected any notion of India backing insurgents. "The people and government of Pakistan know jolly well that this is a false accusation," said Singh.
Meanwhile, Baluchistan simmers. Beyond the standard detachments of border troops, the Pakistani military has kept an occupying army in six major garrisons across the province since 1958. For decades, the Baluch have accused the army of kidnappings, disappearances and extrajudicial killings. In April, three dissident Baluch leaders were reportedly abducted by Pakistani security forces and found days later, their bodies bruised and ridden with bullets, triggering weeks of rioting and violence. A 2008 Amnesty International report, "Denying the Undeniable: Enforced Disappearances in Pakistan," charted at least 600 unresolved disappearances in Baluchistan alone. The 2006 killing of Akbar Bugti — at the time, the emotive figurehead of Baluch separatism — in a firefight with Pakistani troops gave the current wave of Baluch nationalists a martyred hero to latch onto. "The continued atrocities all over Pakistani Baluchistan has kindled a very strong separatist feeling that will have to be answered," says Harrison of the Center for International Policy.
In a report published earlier this year, Harrison recommends the withdrawal of a chunk of the Pakistani occupying army and a political solution that grants the province greater autonomy and control over its resources. The Baluch desire for autonomy commands a decent level of sympathy among the Pakistani public, but is a non-starter with the military, who view the province as a vital geopolitical bulwark against Tehran, Kabul or New Delhi's interests. The political paralysis in dealing with this remote, restive province is another sign, experts say, of the real power the military holds over the country's weak civilian government. "[Pakistani President Asif ]Zardari and his entourage understand what needs to be done," says Harrison. "But they have no ability to get the armed forces and the ISI to cooperate."
The U.S. has remained mostly quiet on the matter, in part because it only has so much leverage that it can wield over the Pakistani military. During the Bush administration, there were suggestions that Washington was even secretly backing anti-Iranian groups like Jundullah and staging covert operations against Iran from Baluchistan. But a more public effort to reach a just solution for Baluch grievances would go a long way toward securing stability for Pakistan in general. The Baluch disturbances have put on hold plans to build a lucrative gas pipeline from Iran to India via Pakistan — a link that would enhance regional cooperation as well as boost the nation's wealth. Calming separatist passions would also serve as a lesson to the Pakistani military, which, as seen during the traumatic and bloody independence of Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan), has a habit of trying to brutally stomp out secessionist movements. At a moment when there are so many hearts and minds to be won — and boots on the ground stretched so thin — it wouldn't hurt to give peace a chance.

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Humanity's greatest achievement is not that we never stumble but that we always get up again when we do.