China is not eager to jump in Afpak conflict

– Analysis: China to keep Pakistan embrace at arm’s length

By Sui-Lee Wee

BEIJING: (Reuters) – Pakistan, facing a crisis with the United States, has leaned closely to longtime partner China, offering its “all-weather friendship” with Beijing as an alternative to Washington.

But Pakistan will be disappointed if it hopes to replace American patronage with the same from China.

While China does not welcome the U.S. presence near its border, it wants stability on its western flank and believes an abrupt withdrawal of Washington’s support for Pakistan could imperil that. It also does not want to upset warming relations with India by getting mired in subcontinent security tension.

Maintaining that delicate balance, China will continue supporting economic cooperation with Pakistan but go slow on defense cooperation. While outwardly all smiles and warm pledges of friendship, China will quietly keep things at arms length.

“I think they see what’s going on in the U.S.-Pakistan front at the moment as reason to tread very carefully,” said Andrew Small, a researcher at the German Marshall Fund think-tank in Brussels who studies China-Pakistan ties and often visits both countries.

“They are taking extra care to make sure that what’s going on in the relationship is correctly understood, not reflecting any willingness to rush in or fill the gap or exploit differences.”

Pakistan’s brittle relationship with the United States, its major donor, has turned openly rancorous. Washington accused Pakistan’s powerful ISI spy agency of directly backing the Afghan Taliban-allied Haqqani network and of providing support for a September 13 attack on the U.S. mission in Kabul. ….

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Conspiracy talk flourishes in Pakistan

Islamabad : American may think that the failed Times Square bomb was planted by a man named Faisal Shahzad. But the view in the supreme court bar association in Pakistan is that the culprit was an American “think tank.”

No one seems to know its name, but everyone has an opinion about it, it is powerful and shadowy, and seems to control just about everything in the American government, including president Obama. ” They have planted this character Faisal Shahzad to implement their script, ” said Hashmat Ali Habib, a lawyer and a member of the bar association.

Conspiracy theory is a national sport in Pakistan, where the main players – the United States, India and Israel – Change position depending on the ebb flow of history. Since 2001, the US has taken centre stage, looming so large in Pakistan’s collective imagination that it sometimes seems to be responsible for every that goes wrong in Pakistan. “When the water stops running from the tap, Pakistanis blame America,” said  an English professor in Lahore.

The problem is more that a peculiar domestic phenomenon for Pakistan. It has grown into a narrative of national victim hood that is a nearly impenetrable barrier to any candid discussion of the problems in Pakistan…

Courtesy: The contact, June 2010