Archive for October, 2018

China in Afghanistan: A Reluctant Leader with Growing Stakes

Posted: October 21, 2018 in Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale
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A piece from late last week as part of a short dossier ahead of the Afghan election done for a new outlet of an excellent Italian think tank called Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale (ISPI). My contribution focused on China’s role in Afghanistan, a common theme which there should be more work on later in the year.

In addition, spoke to Norwegian paper Morgenbladet about Anjem Choudary’s release and the Sun about ISIS in Syria.

China in Afghanistan: A Reluctant Leader with Growing Stakes
Raffaello Pantucci
18 October 2018

lachinainafghanistan

Afghanistan remains an awkward fit within China’s Belt and Road Initiative concept. Look at most maps of Xi Jinping’s keynote foreign policy concept cutting a route across Eurasia, and they tend to go tidily around Afghanistan. But this masks China’s genuine stake in the country, the gradual shift that is visible in Beijing’s activity and finally, the potential importance of the country to China’s broader push across Eurasia.

Starting with national security, China has increasingly sought to harden its security presence in Afghanistan. But this has been focused for the most part on Chinese national interests, rather than providing broader security support to the country. Beijing has provided funding, equipment and training for Afghan forces in Badakhshan, in Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan, and helped build border bases for Tajik forces on their side of the border in Badakhshan. At a strategic level, China has fostered the creation of the Quadrilateral Coordination and Cooperation Mechanism(QCCM) which brings together the Chiefs of Army Staff for China, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan. The focus of the grouping the border region around the Wakhan Corridor which all three of them share.

The key to understand this is that China is not seeking to displace the United States or NATO as a key security provider for Afghanistan’s armed forces. The country is focusing on bolstering its links and the capability of the various armed forces that touch upon its border with Afghanistan. This posture focused on Chinese national security concerns can be seen in China’s previous security engagements with Afghanistan which have for the most part focused on building relations with local groups to ensure that China’s security equities – either its nationals and investments or its concerns about Uighur militants using the territory to plan attacks in China – are covered. 

Having said this, there is an equally noticeable gradual increase in China’s activity in Afghanistan. From largely seeing the country as a graveyard of Empires from which it prefers to keep a discrete distance, China has increasingly stepped forwards to play a role in the country. Chinese firms have won some large extractive projects – in the north CNPC won an oil concession in Amu Darya, while MCC and Jiangxi Copper famously won the Mes Aynak Copper mine in Logar. Construction firms like Xinjiang Beixin, CBRC and Gezhouba have all worked on major infrastructure projects in the country. And at the smaller end of the scale, Chinese traders have sought to exploit the gemstones in Afghanistan, while Afghan shuttle traders are a feature of the thriving community of developing world merchants in Yiwu.

And Beijing has actively sought tomend the previous omission of Afghanistan from the broader Belt and Road, hosting conferences in Kabul and Beijing on the topic. At the same time, China has used a multiplicity of regional groupings to bring different regional configurations together on Afghanistan. Large multilaterals like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA), and the Heart of Asia (or Istanbul) Process have all seen Chinese leadership try to push different parts of them towards playing a role in Afghanistan. At a mini-lateral level, Beijing has brought together the Afghan and Pakistani Foreign Ministers, and engaged, separately, with the US, India, UK and Germany on Afghanistan.

All of this is a step change from earlier years when Beijing largely kept on the sidelines of any discussion around Afghanistan. To some degree this was part of a general reticence by Beijing to become too involved in any major international entanglements, but it was also a product of China’s habit of abrogating its Afghanistan policy to Islamabad. While Beijing continues to be responsive to Pakistan’s concerns in Afghanistan, it has increasingly struck out its own path. The key turning point can likely be seen in 2014 when Beijing realized that American-led NATO efforts in Afghanistan had a shelf life and were not likely to result in a tidy resolution in Kabul. And while Islamabad could provide some support to advance Beijing’s goals, it did not have total control. The United States instead, was not a continental power. It could eventually up and leave – as a physical neighbour, Beijing was a hostage of geography.

At the same time, the main running narrative from Beijing was one of Belt and Road. There was a gradual build up to this through Xi Jinping’s early years – with a major foreign policy work conference on peripheral diplomacy, a refocusing on Xinjiang and China’s border regions, some major foreign travel to South Asia by leadership figures (including in May 2013 the signing of the MoU that laid the foundation for the China Pakistan Economic Corridor), and finally in September and October 2013 the respective announcements of the Silk Road Economic Belt (in Astana, Kazakhstan) and the 21stCentury Maritime Silk Road (in Jakarta, Indonesia). In 2014, China decided to create a position of Special Envoy for Afghan Affairs, appointing seasoned diplomat and Afghanistan watcher Sun Yuxi to the role.

Yet while the appointment was a clear signal of focus by Beijing, it was made in a manner which seemed to suggest it was adjacent to the broader Belt and Road Initiative. At the time, the concept was still working itself out, so in some ways this was not surprising, but the net result was to create a sense of BRI not necessarily being something which encompassed Afghanistan.

The appointment of Ambassador Sun, however, did demonstrate a level of seriousness by Beijing in terms of trying to understand how to engage with Afghanistan at a more sophisticated level than just engaging with Kabul. The difficulty with a country like Afghanistan for a power like China which is still developing its civil service cadre, is to find individuals who are able to understand countries from the inside and figure out which levers deliver results. In a tribal country like Afghanistan, this problem is multiplied, with local power brokers as significant to guarantee success of projects as the central government. As an Ambassador who had served in the country for some time, Ambassador Sun had a good understanding of these dynamics and good relations across the board on the ground. He was also instrumental in getting Beijing’s efforts are helping try to broker negotiations between the Taliban, Islamabad and Kabul together – playing an important role in the creation of the Quadrilateral Coordination Group (QCG) bringing together China, USA, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This was not unfortunately always the case with Chinese investments in the country. When CNPC embarked on its project in the Amu Darya region, they did it with a company which was not linked to the local power brokers, causing issues when their engineers deployed into the region to deliver the actual project. 

Over time, Beijing has learned these lessons, and is increasingly seeking opportunities to engage with Afghanistan in new formats and play a slightly more forward role. It has ensured that it has developed a range of relationships within the country amongst all the different factions, but at the same time ensured that it has prioritized strengthening its specific border with Afghanistan to make sure China is protected from overspill of security problems. Currently the focus is largely on bolstering capacity in neighbouring weaker countries (in Central Asia, or parts of Pakistan), while also continuing to show a willingness to talk about playing a positive role in Afghanistan. Beijing’s broader caution, however, remains and the country continues to refuse to take a clear leadership role with Kabul. A posture which is likely to continue until China sees with greater clarity what exact role the United States sees for itself in the longer run.

 

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI)

Al Muhajiroun’s Long Shadow

Posted: October 20, 2018 in Hurst
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Trying to stay on top of my posting this time – wrote something earlier this week for my publisher Hurst’s excellent blog. A great place to do slightly longer form writing on the topic of Al Muhajiroun given the current attention it is getting. Of course much more of this in my book!

Al Muhajiroun’s Long Shadow

19 October 2018 |  Raffaello Pantucci

Many years ago I had coffee with Anjem Choudary. Ensconced in the Desert Rose Café in Walthamstow where he would hold court, he joked about the punishments that would be meted out to homosexuals in his imagined Caliphate as he brushed off my questions.

As he is released from prison in the United Kingdom, it is one of Choudary’s followers who is most on my mind – a young man he introduced as ‘Saiful Islam’. At the time, Anjem was clearly quite proud of his eager and well-spoken young acolyte, telling me how his name meant ‘Sword of Islam’.

I later realised that this young man was Abu Rumaysah or Siddartha Dhar, who is now more notoriously known as Jihadi Sid. Reportedly on American targeted killing lists, he is among the British jihadis still at large in Syria. His presence reflects the long shadow that al-Muhajiroun still casts. The latter remains more visible than you would necessarily expect. The persistent appearance of al-Muhajirounis on the security services radar exemplifies the chronic nature of the terrorist problem that Britain and other countries face.

The recently concluded Westminster Bridge attack inquest exemplifies this phenomenon. During the course of the investigation into the 2017 March terrorist attack on Parliament, it was revealed that Khalid Masood had shown up repeatedly on the fringes of investigations into al-Muhajiroun related networks. Back in 2004, his number was found on the phone of Waheed Mahmood, one of the key figures in the first large-scale bombing plot in the United Kingdom, referred to by the police as ‘Operation Crevice’. At around the time he was in touch with Mahmood, he reported to one of his wives much later that he also met Abdul Wahid Majid, another Crawley man who had been involved with al-Muhajiroun and who subsequently blew himself up in Syria in 2014.

 Muslims Against Crusades 30.7.2011-563 – Anjem Choudary ©Snapperjack https://www.flickr.com/photos/snapperjack/ [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Moving to Luton from Crawley in 2009, Khalid Masood slipped seamlessly back into the al-Muhajiroun milieu – living yards from both Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly and Abu Rahin Aziz. Al Abdaly blew himself up in Stockholm, while Aziz was killed by a drone strike in Syria. Following his death, al-Muhajiroun supporters in Luton distributed sweets in celebration of Aziz’s death. A separate cell from Luton became so incensed at his demise that they explored the possibility of targeting an American airbase in Britain as a potential target.

It is important to note that it is not clear from the evidence presented in the inquest that Masood knew any of these people well – but the coincidence and his previous contacts with the group suggest he would have likely known who they were. He was close to Ibrahim Anderson, a local al-Muhajirouni who was jailed in 2016 for canvassing support for ISIS. By February 2010, Masood’s activity had escalated to the point that MI5 opened an investigation into him. During the inquest, information was uncovered that between “2012 and 2016…he was appearing as contacts of SOIs [subjects of Interest] who were linked to ALM [Al-Muhajiroun],” reportedly, however, there were no “notable ALM figures” amongst this group.

Although a peripheral figure to the al-Muhajiroun community, he was active on its fringes. According to one of his wives, he participated in dawah stalls in Luton, and sought to spread the Holy Word, recruiting one young convert who seems to have been a close acolyte of his. While this is behaviour typical of al-Muhajiroun members – it is admittedly also not out of character for a more generally religiously inclined person.

This was not the only legal process underway involving men from the al-Muhajiroun orbit going on last week. Two others featured in trials, albeit for very different reasons. Late last week, Hassan Butt, from Manchester, was jailed for at least nine years for various fraud offences. On the other side of Europe, at a court in Bolzano, Alto Adige, a trial is scheduled with British based Kurdish extremist Awat Karkuky (currently in jail in Britain) on the docket.

Hassan Butt appears to have been perpetrating fairly basic online fraud: selling things that he never despatched (but took payment for), purchasing other goods from companies and then claiming they never arrived, demanding refunds. Finally, he took loans and credit out to supposedly support his online business, and refused to pay them back, claiming to have been defrauded himself – going so far as to provide a false police number related to the fraud. Not the high capers of an Ocean’s 11 style robbery, but rather the more mundane fraud that clogs up police time around the modern world.

This digression seems to bear little relevance to al-Muhajiroun till we delve into the organization’s history and its heady post-September 11 days. Still headed in Britain by Omar Bakri Mohammed, the group jumped from relative obscurity onto the front pages as stories of British fighters dying alongside the Taliban appeared in the British press. A regular feature in this coverage was the then al-Muhajiroun spokesman, Hassan Butt. A loud Prestwich lad, Butt would talk with pride about his martyred friends, and the numerous fighters and funders who were ‘lining up’ to support their cause. He had been back and forth between al-Muhajiroun’s Pakistan and UK branches – who were in the midst of some tension at the time – and features in many stories from the period. In 2002, he returned to the UK offering his story to the press for £100,000 – only to be ignored and then become a subject of police interest. He fled to Pakistan where others in the group got irritated by his behaviour and reported on his constant pursuit of money.

Finally, Omar Bakri told the BBC after some particularly inflammatory commentary that Hassan had provided: “Hassan Butt no longer represents al-Muhajiroun in Pakistan. We are an ideological, political party. We do not recruit people to go and fight on behalf of anybody or to indulge in any military activities…In what he is doing he does not have our support. That is prohibited by Islam – to launch attacks against people just because they are British, just because you happen to disagree with them here and there.”

Yet, years later, it was revealed that Omar Bakri had been pushing Hassan to reach out to the British press. The story emerged as Hassan testified against one of his friends from al-Muhajiroun, Habib Ahmed, with whom he tried to trick a few newspapers into paying for his story. Earlier in 2007, Hassan had a turnaround in which he claimed to have rejected his violent Islamist past and instead become a model citizen – going so far as to meet with a government minister and advancing ideas about how to de-radicalize British Muslims. He became the rent-a-quote for the international media seeking an extremist voice – showing up across the UK news, but also appearing on the American flagship broadcast show 60 Minutes. At one point he claimed that he had so angered his former extremist colleagues that one of them had stabbed him in the street. Yet by 2009 he was in the courts admitting publicly that he was a liar and a fantasist, and that he had stabbed himself. One journalist with whom he had co-authored a book reportedly based on Butt’s life found himself in a serious legal quandary. Now Hassan has finally had his comeuppance and is going to jail. Not, it is worth noting, for his extremist behaviour but for far more mundane criminal activity. However there can be no doubt that he was for a while a relatively significant figure within the community of al-Muhajiroun, for both good and bad reasons, from their perspective.

Inside the British penal system he will be joining an ever-growing roster of al-Muhajirouni cadres serving jail sentences. One of this group is Awat Karkuky (also known as Awat Wahab Hamasalih), a violent Islamist extremist jailed two years ago for his links to ISIS, and who is back on trial (remotely) in Italy, as mentioned above, for his role in a European network of extremists called Rawti Shax. Uncovered a couple of years ago, it focused on radicalised Iraqi Kurds and was ideologically headed by Mullah Krekar. Krekar himself is also not appearing in the Italian court in person, but is instead on trial remotely from Norway where he is in hiding, refusing to appear in court.

Not a direct al-Muhajirouni (though it is often hard to see or understand the difference), Karkuky was hosted by Anjem Choudary when he visited the UK, and before that helped facilitate Choudary’s visit to Finland where he spoke in 2013 under the ‘Shariah4Finland’ banner. Karkuky was thrown out of Finland for this and other behaviour, and later jailed in Britain for his role in recruiting for and supporting ISIS. He was a figure of enough significance amongst extremist Kurdish groups that his life story was used as a heroic narrative to recruit others.

It is not clear what will happen to Karkuky. Currently he is serving a six year sentence, at the end of which he may face another extradition to Italy, which he has contested in the past. Butt will serve a longer sentence in prison for his various non-extremist offences. It seems hard to imagine that either will return to be productive members of society at any point soon, but more likely that, like Choudary, they will retain some problematic attitudes and now will have long prison sentences on their CVs. This will mean they will stay individuals of concern to the security services for the foreseeable future. All are charismatic in their different ways and have drawn others into violent Islamist behaviour.

Other recently released long-term al-Muhajirounis certainly seem regularly to drift back within its orbit of behaviour. Ricardo MacFarlane, of Muslim Patrols fame, has apparently been appearing at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, while former prize boxer Anthony Small has also left prison and continues to rage against the system, broadcasting on YouTube his intention to continue his struggle. Neither of these men are doing anything illegal in either of these acts, and this may be where their activism remains.

But experience has shown us that figures from the al-Muhajiroun network remain of concern to the security services. As the cases of Masood, Karkuky and Butt show, they can take a long time to work their way through our judicial and penal systems and may ultimately express themselves as problems in ways different from what we might suspect. For a while this was something that the security services relied on – most of these individuals in the wider al-Muhajiorun community are infringing the law in some way or other, hence the authorities simply focused on arresting them on any charges they could, thereby keeping them off the streets. But people get savvy to these tactics and act more circumspectly, albeit without necessarily abandoning their ideology.

For Anjem Choudhary, it is likely that he will continue to be a magnet for young people or other lost souls seeking easy explanations of the world around them, and it is hard to see him rejecting his ideology any time soon. It will also be difficult for him to return to his old ways given the highly restrictive conditions of his release. Choudhary’s potential for de-radicalization and redemption should not however be entirely discounted (some radical young men who used to be at the forefront of the group seem to have undergone fairly dramatic turnarounds), although one ought to regard such a possibility with a healthy dose of scepticism.

This is in many ways the heart of the al-Muhajiroun problem, one that shows no sign of disappearing. Not all its cadres get involved in violence, but many terrorist plots and networks uncovered in the past have snared individuals long associated with the group. And, more worryingly, analysts and the authorities in Britain continue to observe such patterns of behaviour more than two decades after the group enjoyed its heyday. The same faces and individuals consistently show up, and engage in violent or extremist behaviour, often many years after their first encounter with the group.

While Anjem Choudhury’s return will doubtless give al-Muhajiroun a brief burst of publicity, it is unlikely to change the group’s current behaviour. As long as he struggles to interact with wide numbers of people, he will pose less of a threat. But how long can such security cover be maintained? The group’s broader network remains seeded amongst Europe’s Muslim communities and will re-emerge as a problem for the authorities across the Continent for the foreseeable future, with or without him visibly at the helm of al-Muhajiroun.

 

Raffaello Pantucci is Director of International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute and the author of “We Love Death As You Love Life: Britain’s Suburban Terrorists”

Clamping down on hate preachers like Anjem Choudary will only make things worse

Posted: October 16, 2018 in Telegraph
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Finally this evening, a piece for the Telegraph which they have given a title which clashes pretty wildly with what I have written. The point I seek to make in the article was that Anjem Choudhry needs stringent detention, but we need to be careful that we do not start to set some sort of precedents which we then start to over employ. Anyway.

Beyond this to conclude my catch up, spoke recently to El Pais about ISIS, spoke to the New Arab about ISIS in Central Asia, and my earlier piece about China’s security problems in Pakistan was picked up by the Economic Times.

Clamping down on hate preachers like Anjem Choudary will only make things worse

In a picture taken on April 3, 2015 British muslim cleric Anjem Choudary poses for a photograph after attending a rally calling for muslims to refrain from voting in the 2015 general election during outside the Regents Park mosque in London. British radical preacher Anjem Choudary was charged under anti-terror laws on August 5, 2015 with inviting support for the Islamic State jihadist group. Choudary was denied bail at Westminster Magistrates court and remanded into custody to re-appear at a London court on August 28. AFP PHOTO / NIKLAS HALLE'N (Photo credit should read NIKLAS HALLE'N/AFP/Getty Images)
Extremists like Mr Choudary are a long-term management problem CREDIT: NIKLAS HALLE’N/ AFP
 

Anjem Choudary is imminently back on our streets. The panic that his release has engendered is likely an exaggeration of the threat he poses. But the bigger issue his case raises is the persistent and chronic responsibility that he is to the police and security services.

Given he is unlikely to recant his abhorrent views, he, and a select few around him, will continue to be an expensive and long-term burden. The answer is a pointed strategy to manage them, while also making sure not to create a parallel system of justice that damages our liberties in the long run.

There has been scant evidence provided that Mr Choudary has moved on with his life. While some committed and long-term extremists do change their minds over time, these are unfortunately the exception rather than the norm.

Were he allowed to, Mr Choudary would undoubtedly return to his earlier pattern of behaviour: advancing his extremist views, recruiting followers to the cause and providing a microphone for violent Islamist ideologies in the West. He has been on this journey for his entire adult life, merely adapting his rhetoric to reflect how legislation has changed around him.

He is not, however, simply being turned back onto the streets. Mr Choudary will be placed under highly restrictive conditions. He will be kept offline, away from centres of radicalisation and his old networks, away from children, and have to report to authorities on a regular basis. This will have an effect on his ability to propagate his message.

But in many ways the bigger problem is not that he returns to his old ways. His high profile almost guarantees he will be unable to move without being observed or controlled. The political ramifications of him doing something embarrassing mean police and security services will ensure he is on a very short leash. Security services will try to extend this tight control to those in the immediate circle around him – though as we have seen with other recent releases, this is difficult to do for a community that does not get smaller.

This is a chronic management problem. Dedicated extremists like Mr Choudary are unlikely to recant their views any time in the near or medium-term future. And as we have seen with cases like Khalid Masood, the Westminster Bridge attacker; Ronald Fiddler, the former Guantanamo detainee who blew himself up in Iraq last year; Abdul Wahid Majid, the Crawley man involved in the al Muhajiroun community since the late 1990s, who was the first reported British suicide bomber in Syria in 2014; or Terrence Kelly, more famously known as Khalid Kelly, who first fell into al Muhajiroun’s orbit in 2002 and then blew himself up in an ISIS attack in Iraq in November 2016 (to name a few).

People can take a long time to move from moving in extremist circles to being involved in attacks. Of course the radicalisation trajectory is not the same for everyone. But the point for security services is that radicalised individuals can remain of potential concern for some time.

Inevitably, the answer is complicated, but has to be individual specific. For persistent long-term radicals who show little evidence of recanting their views or moving on with their lives, restrictive conditions that control who they fraternise with, what information they access, and where they are able to go is the answer.

New technologies may be able to help alleviate the burden of how this is carried out (monitoring technology may enable methods of keeping tabs on people and their behaviour without having physical officers in permanent observation). This needs to also be accompanied by intense efforts to get people to disengage and de-radicalise. All of this may appear draconian, but it is a limited number of people that we are talking about.

For those who break these terms or refuse to move on, escalating levels of punitive sentencing will keep them off the streets. This reduces the burden on security services for a period, but also is an important deterrent to others.

But, most importantly in some ways, we have to be careful that legislation or tools we put in place to control Mr Choudary (and the relatively small group around him) do not completely warp our legal system.

As irritating and consistently dangerous he and parts of his group might be – they represent a fringe of a fringe. Overreaction will only strengthen their sense of victimhood and bolster their cause.

Managing this as a chronic problem with no clear conclusion is unfortunately going to be the only way to deal with a core group of individuals who trouble our society. Letting them simply run rampant or punishing them in an extreme way will not make the problem go away, it might in fact make it even worse.

 

Unbuckling China’s belt and road plan will not be easy for Western powers

Posted: October 16, 2018 in South China Morning Post
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And another piece, this time a more recent one for the South China Morning Post exploring reactions to the Belt and Road once again.

Unbuckling China’s belt and road plan will not be easy for Western powers

While the major powers are offering alternatives to infrastructure funding, developing countries are trying to play a stronger hand in negotiating with the Chinese

PUBLISHED : Sunday, 07 October, 2018, 7:32pm
UPDATED : Sunday, 07 October, 2018, 7:32pm

 

Five years since the concept of the “Belt and Road Initiative” was inaugurated, the current public narrative is pushback.

From Washington to Sri Lanka and Malaysia, via parts of Eurasia, the overriding discourse is of loosening the belt and stopping the road.

Major powers have started to marshal their resources to offer alternatives, while developing countries are shuffling their decks to try to play a stronger hand in negotiating with the Chinese.

The most recent expressions of resistance have come from Europe and the United States. In Europe, the new Europe-Asia Connectivity Strategy paper offers a vision for how Europe would like the Eurasian continent connected up.

In contrast, the United States appears to be both offering a direct line of support – through a US$110 million-plus fund for investment into ‘digital economy, energy, and infrastructure’ in the Indo-Pacific – and a new announcement that Overseas Private Investment Corporation – the US government’s development finance institution – may be receiving a supercharge to allow it to more directly compete with China in the developing world.

This all comes in the wake of Japan’s efforts to engage with India and others to respond to specific Chinese projects.

There is a coherence to this kind of response. When we are talking about the developing world, we are talking about parts of the world that are seeking investment and need infrastructure.

To tell them to just not take the Chinese offer, in the absence of anything better on the table, seems miserly and unlikely to generate success. To offer an alternative makes sense and leverages the positive potential that the belt and road strategy can also offer.

At the same time, however, we are seeing a lot of things getting tangled up together.

Seen from Washington, this response to the belt and road strategy is part of a bigger pushback against China that can be seen in multiple different spaces.

It comes at the same time as conversations in Washington of sanctions against Chinese leaders for what is going on in Xinjiang; recalling of diplomats from countries that have recently turned from Taipei to Beijing; more arms sales to Taiwan; the renaming of the Pacific Command to the Indo-Pacific Command; sanctions against other Chinese figures for arms sales to Russia; increasing anger about intellectual property theft and an ever-escalating trade war.

It all looks to Beijing like teeth are being shown in the broader strategic confrontation between China and the US. While not all of the activity may actually be part of a strategy, it can certainly be interpreted this way.

Taken together, this means that we are potentially going to miss the bigger point of the specific pushback to the belt and road strategy, which is much more focused on refining opportunities than rejecting them.

The developing world, where these projects are happening, is aware that sometimes the deals struck under the belt and road vision were problematic.

In Islamabad, a few months ago, a government minister spoke at a public event about how troubled some of the contracts and agreements were. Subsequent statements have reiterated this, with the new Imran Khan government seeking to renegotiate terms, payment schedules and get stronger commitments from China that its firms will deliver on the local benefits to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.

In Malaysia, a new leadership has come to power concerned with its inherited finances and has pushed back on some projects the country was engaging with China. In Myanmar, late last year the government seemed to suggest that it was not keen to push forward the long delayed Myitsone Dam project. And there are others.

In contrast, the much-discussed Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka has had various oscillations (mostly linked to local election cycles), but has remained a Chinese project with the government maintaining links with the government in Colombo. The trajectory of the project has consistently been forward.

This is the point. We are seeing pushback that is more renegotiation than cancellation. Rather than a strategic response and coordinated pushback to the belt and road strategy, we are seeing a series of data points blinking at the same time.

As a concept, the “Belt and Road Initiative” touches on numerous countries, many in the developing world. These are countries prone to changes of public mood or government, and often lacking in effective managerial capacity. A big outside investor becomes a natural target.

None of this is to necessarily play down the problems that some belt and road projects have engendered, but it is important to distinguish these issues from renegotiation, and see them for what they are, to be able to formulate an adequate and appropriate response.

In many of the cases that are getting attention, it is likely that we are going to see the projects eventually proceed anyway. The logic of many of them is tied to China or Chinese firms, opportunities that are not going to go away. Some are superfluous or not what is needed and will be dropped. Most likely, timelines will slip, but projects are still likely to march on.

This is key to disaggregating some of the rhetoric currently circulating about the belt and road strategy.

In some cases of pushback, the problems have a geostrategic edge. But in many of the publicised examples, the projects or agreements are flawed and countries are grappling with how to respond.

An effective response would be to work with the various powers along the way to help them manage through the problems and find ways of working with the projects, rather than simply seeing these clashes as potential lines of containment.

While a containment approach may be bolstered by offering alternative lines of credit, the reality is that these countries will still have the Chinese option on the table. And unless some heavy sanction is imposed or threatened, some will still opt to take it.

Or more likely, they will seek to take both, to try to help fill the trillion dollar infrastructure deficit that continues to exist around the world.

Raffaello Pantucci is director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London.

The word “terrorism” no longer captures the threat we face

Posted: October 16, 2018 in Prospect
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And another new piece (from last month now), this time for the magazine Prospect. Tries to answer a complicated issue about terrorism that I hope to explore through some bigger projects soon.

The word “terrorism” no longer captures the threat we face

Violent attacks look less and less like terrorism as we know it

September 26, 2018 / Leave a comment

We think of terrorism as acts of violence in advance of a cause. Yet, look at recent attacks in the west and it is often hard to discern much evidence of ideological adherence or links to specific terrorist groups. In fact, the question is whether what is happening can still be genuinely considered terrorism at all. And if this is where the threat picture has gone, what does it mean for our response?

The nature of the threat is changing, with individuals increasingly acting with their own motivations rather than direct guidance from terrorist leaders. You can interpret this in a number of ways. It may be the product of an effective security response, as intelligence agencies get better at disrupting networks. It is also possible that this is part of a grand strategic plan by the terrorist groups themselves. They see a tougher operational environment and push their networks in this more diffuse direction as a result. Or maybe it is more random than that, with terrorist ideology in the public space drawing all sorts to it.

To those at the receiving end, this can all seem semantic. If you are stabbed by someone, you do not really care about the exact reason for it. The victims in London Bridge, outside parliament, in Barcelona and in Trappes will not have been focussing on this.

Yet these attackers were acting with wildly different kinds of reasons: the London Bridge terrorists came from a broader network of violent Islamists long known to authorities; all of the others appear to be individuals with personal or psycho-social reasons rather than any strict ideological motivation. It is very clear that there was an ideological steer in one while in the other three, it seems as though individuals were just latching onto the ideology as a cover for something else going on in their lives.

What does this mean for security services? What does it mean for terrorist cells? And does the word “terrorism” even apply at all?

The immediate problem is to the counter-terrorists who are struggling to manage this situation using their traditional tools. If terrorists are no longer clearly driven, ideological individuals from networks but isolated citizens with anger issues and troubled pasts, how are you going to come across them prior to their attempted attack, with the set of tripwires based around traditional networks you are watching? Something made even harder if the weapons they are going to use are all around us, like knives or cars.

There is also a problem for terrorist groups, who will have ever-lessening control over the plotters. These isolated loners or small cells might be adopting the terrorist group’s garb and methodology, but it is not very clear that they are actually advancing the group’s goals. Not if it now looks like a random catch-all for a variety of human problems, rather than an organised group driven by a plan.

More broadly: if the terrorist group’s cause (or any cause) is not being advanced, then can it still really be considered terrorism? Or are we in fact looking at an expression of human behaviour which is not really ideological terrorism, but something else. Random violence. Human rage. Expressions of anger through demonstrative public acts.

And if this is the case, what is the relevance of the terrorist group in this discussion? Seen in this light, the group could become a red herring which is distracting us from the actual problem that we are facing.

Of course, there are clearly still terrorist groups advancing plots with devastating consequences. The attack in Manchester fits this profile, and no doubt others have been disrupted by effective security forces, both in the UK and abroad. But this is often not what the counter-terrorism officers in the police or MI5 are facing. They are instead finding their time consumed by cases like Salih Kater (the Westminster car attacker) or Niamur Rahman (the slightly shambolic young man who had plans to storm Downing Street with a bomb to decapitate the prime minister, in part to avenge the death of a relation who had fought with Islamic State).

Neither of these people should be excused for their horrendous behaviour, but we do need to ask some more fundamental questions about whether this is terrorism and whether we should be attributing the responsibility to terrorist groups. This clarity is important, as once we have it, we will be in a better place to prevent further loss of life.

The lesson of the Pakistan suicide attack: China will have to pay a high price for its infrastructure plan

Posted: October 16, 2018 in South China Morning Post
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Quite a bit of catch up posting to do. Been distracted with various projects, so going to do it all in one sweep this evening. First up is an article for the South China Morning Post looking at the threats to Chinese interests in Pakistan from separatist groups in the country.

The lesson of the Pakistan suicide attack: China will have to pay a high price for its infrastructure plan

China’s greatest security problem in strife-torn Pakistan is that it is increasingly becoming the focus of separatists’ attention, Raffaello Pantucci writes

PUBLISHED : Sunday, 26 August, 2018, 12:16pm
UPDATED : Sunday, 26 August, 2018, 9:54pm

 

The attempted suicide bombing against a bus carrying Chinese engineers in Dalbandin, Balochistan highlights the complexity of the security problems China faces in Pakistan.

The attack was a rare suicide bombing for the Balochistan Liberation Army and was specifically targeting China. It showed how Beijing is finding itself dragged into a clash whose answer lies in the resolution of fundamental issues within Pakistan.

In February this year, The Financial Times ran a story which claimed that Chinese officials had been negotiating for years with Baluchi separatists.

At around the same time, the Chinese ambassador to Islamabad gave an interview to BBC Urdu in which he proclaimed that Baluchi separatists “were not real Pakistanis” and did not pose a threat to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

The negotiations story was denied by senior Baluchi leaders as well as the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. BLA leader Aslam Baloch, whose son blew himself up at Dalbandin, dismissed the talks, stating: “Our people are [disappearing] every day. They are being killed. Their houses are being looted and burned. In such a situation, any dialogue with China is impossible. We reject such a proposal.”

None of this is that surprising, nor is it impossible that China (or Chinese entities) have been in contact with Baluchi groups.

Since the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor was announced, at least two publicised incidents have occurred in which Chinese nationals were almost killed by Baluchi separatists; other, similar occurrences likely have received less attention. Furthermore, many have taken place where Pakistanis have lost their lives.

In September 2016, the Pakistani government announced that at least 44 Pakistanis had lost their lives on CPEC projects. Since then, there have been many more reported incidents by the BLA specifically targeting CPEC projects – incidents they publicly link afterwards to CPEC –, leading mostly to the deaths of Pakistani guards or workers. Prior to the announcement of CPEC, at least seven Chinese workers had died at the hands of Baluchi separatists, as well as numerous Pakistanis.

And China’s problems have expanded beyond Balochistan. Since CPEC’s announcement, the targeting of Chinese interests and nationals by Sindh separatist groups has increased noticeably. After one bombing that injured a Chinese worker and his companion in May 2016 in Karachi, a note was found stating that “we will oppose every anti-Sindh project, including the China-Pakistan economic corridor”.

Just over a year later, a bomb detonated after a Chinese convoy passed in Port Qasim. A message issued soon afterwards declared: “Sindhudesh Revolutionary Army claims the responsibility of the bomb attacks on Chinese engineers in Karachi today and warns the Chinese that they should not become the part of any project in Sindh which may be against the national interest of Sindhis.”

In fact, the specific threat to China seems to emanate more from separatists than Islamists. It is true that since CPEC’s announcement, four Chinese nationals have lost their lives in Pakistan to violent Islamists, but it is not clear that China was a target in the incidents. In contrast, Baluchi or Sindhi groups loudly state that they are targeting China.

There are obvious reasons for this. For separatist groups, the Pakistani state is the ultimate enemy. As Islamabad’s closest friend, Beijing becomes a target by association. And the people of these regions do not feel like they are getting their piece of the CPEC bounty.

At a conference in Islamabad shortly before the election, I listened as representatives from Gwadar complained publicly (before numerous security officials) to a Chinese official sitting on a panel about the issues they were having accessing fresh water.

This example illustrates a problem that Beijing faces in Pakistan and can be found in other BRI countries as well. The problems of separatism and central government anger in Balochistan and Sindh are not new. Violence in the country is not new (and is in fact in decline), but China is increasingly becoming the focus of attention as the biggest outside player who is focusing on supporting the central state.

And while the Pakistani government can provide some support and security for Chinese nationals sent to deliver CPEC in the hope that the economic prosperity it may generate will help alleviate these issues in the longer term, this is only part of the answer.

The longer-term answer to the problems of separatism in these regions are to be found in political solutions: issues that infrastructure and mining investment will not resolve, and may in fact be exacerbating.

As Rehan Baloch stated in his message before he tried to murder a busload of Chinese engineers: “Through this act, I want to make China and its people realise [that] whosoever will try to meddle in Baloch issues without Baloch nation’s consent, will face the wrath of Baloch nation.”

Raffaello Pantucci is director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London.