How does China fit into the war on terror? *

[Please see note in footer]

In May of this year, James Mann stated in an article for the Washington Post, “The Iraq war isn’t over, but one thing’s clear: China won.” The principal being that as the US struggles to polish its mottled status and sway around the globe, China’s stepping into the spotlight. As each month passes, it’s getting harder and harder to believe that’s not true.

Hell, the Middle Kingdom might be winning the War on Terror, too.

There is little good news for the US coming out of the Middle East. In 2002, Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA’s bin Laden Unit, criticized Western media outlets for hastily declaring “the Taliban’s complete military and political collapse” — one of the War on Terror’s most decisive victories at the time — noting, for example, that there was no account of “more than forty thousand soldiers the Taliban still had under arms when Kandahar fell.” Today, as news of an ever-strengthening Taliban continue to flow out of the black hole where Afghanistan ends and Pakistan begins — a place more aptly known as “Talibanistan” — Scheuer’s assessment seems to have been justified.

Not to mention that opium production, and most recently that of marijuana, has skyrocketed in the years since 9-11. According to the UN, Afghanistan’s production of illicit opium accounted for 92 percent of the world total in 2005, up from 70 percent in 2000. This is even worse when you consider how easy it is for troops to get a hit.

In Iraq, there is perhaps even less to be hopeful about. Aside from ongoing violence and no end in sight, a recent report puts the cost of the war in Iraq — including “hidden costs” like interest on loans, misplaced funds, and healthcare for wounded soldiers — at $1.6 trillion, or $20,900 for a family of four. Of course, many find these numbers suspect, their being the product of Democrats on Congress' Joint Economic Committee. Other estimates, though, have ranged from the American Enterprise Institute’s nearly $500 billion — which, with the National Priorities Project pegging the current price tag at $470 billion and counting, seems low — to well over $2 trillion. If I'm not mistaken, the initial estimated cost was $50 billion dollars.

In spite of all of this, on the other side of the world, China is quietly winning its battles in the War on Terror. Indeed, it isn’t actually “fighting” a war on terror, so much as it is profiting from being far removed from the ideological and political histories that are trying to end one another.

Most people are well aware of the crucial role China plays in globalized production lines — for better and for worse (mostly the former). Many are also conscious of China’s current push to modernize and restructure its military. It was noted recently in the New York Times that China’s “production and acquisition of submarines is now five times that of America’s” — a fact that has many military analysts believing that “it is mounting a quantitative advantage in naval technology that could erode [the US’s] qualitative one.”

However, many people seem to be in the dark when it comes to the role China plays in the War on Terror. Well, I am too, I guess. As long as I’ve been studying conflict around the world, I’ve been finding that China pops up nearly everywhere. So, I decided to delve into it a little more.

Take Sudan, a country with a history of supporting different terrorist organizations — most notably harboring Osama bin Laden from 1991 to 1996. While most of the world has condemned Sudan’s roving militias as genocide — one of the first among those being President Bush — China has vetoed UN resolutions that would have brought sanctions against the Khartoum government. Sudan is one of China’s largest sources of oil abroad, which China reciprocates through its role as the African nation’s largest supplier of arms. According to Human Rights Watch, China has been selling “ammunition, tanks, helicopters, and fighter aircraft” to oppressive Sudanese regimes for decades.

This will come as little surprise, though, to people around the world who watched as China reluctantly, and hypocritically, called for democracy in Myanmar in response to the government’s ruthless crackdown on peaceful protestors. After all, this came not long after China blocked the US’s call at the UN for Myanmar’s human rights violations to be put on the Security Council docket.

Moving to Afghanistan, there were reports in September that Chinese weapons had made their way to the Taliban. According to the BBC, the Taliban made claims — corroborated by Afghan officials — boasting a stock of “Chinese-made suface-to-air missiles, anti-aircraft guns, landmines, rocket-propelled genades and components for roadside bombs.”

On the other side of the border in Pakistan —one of America’s most stalwart allies in the war on terror and, at present, one of the region’s most unstable governments — plans are being drawn up for a sale of French Thales RC400 radar and MBDA Mica missiles. The one hitch is that, according to The Weekly Standard, “the Pakistani Aeronautical Complex and its Chinese partners have comprehensive agreements that grant access for both parties to any technology acquired by the other.”

This sale, being orchestrated by France's Délégation Générale pour l'Armement (DGA), is problematic enough considering the current state of turmoil Pakistan is in. In a recent study by Foreign Policy Magazine and the Center for American Progress, seventy-five percent of the experts interviewed — nearly twice as many as any other country on the list — believed that Pakistan was most likely to transfer nuclear technology to terrorists in the next three to five years. North Korea, Russia, and Iran came next with forty-two, thirty-eight, and thirty-one percent, respectively.

It’s bad enough that the DGA is trying to sell such technology to a government that’s already on shaky ground and has a history of misplacing weapons. Yet, more disquieting over here in Taiwan is the fact that both India and Taiwan use French Mirage 2000 aircraft, which are outfitted with the same missile and radar technology that the DGA hopes to sell to Pakistan and ipso facto China. Such a sale would counteract India and Taiwan’s investment in the technology, making it more or less worthless.

Perhaps the most ironic of these recent developments, though, comes in the form of a Chinese jet reportedly being sold to Syria and Iran. In a strange turn of events, the technical details of a shelved Israeli fighter jet called the Lavi — which had been being developed with $1.3 billion in funding from the US — were “provided” to the Chinese. Nearly two decades later, in a ceremony in Beijing, the PRC rolled out the Jian-10 fighter, which — according to The Weekly Standard — bore a “striking resemblance” to the Israeli fighter, right down to the missile guidance system that “allows missiles to be aimed in the direction of the pilot’s eyes.”

In October, it was reported the Russian newspaper Kommersant that the Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group would sell 24 Jian-10s to Iran. Another report from the French defense publication TTU claims another sale going down between China and Syria.

Let’s run through that one more time. The Lavi was drawn up in Israel with funding from the US, realized — with additional American, Russian, and Chinese technology — in China as the Jian-10, then sold to Iran and Syria.

So, is China winning the War on Terror or at least winning from it? In light of all this, it seems as such. China seems to sit blissfully on the banks of conflict, stirring the waters, yet never getting caught in the current. China could possibly be the only country in the world that openly does business with the US and the EU as well as with Sudan and Myanmar.

But it doesn’t seem that China will be able to carry on like this for good. After all, most analysts roundly reject that America was targeted for its freedoms or its democracy, rather for how our exploits in the Middle East were perceived. As the former chief of the CIA’s bin Laden Unit wrote in his book Imperial Hubris:

[al-Qaeda's] goal is not to wipe out our secular democracy, but to deter us by military means from attacking the things they love. Bin Laden et al. are not eternal warriors; there is no evidence they are fighting for fighting's sake, or that they would be lost for things to do without a war to wage. There is evidence to the contrary, in fact, showing bin Laden and other Islamist leaders would like to end the war, get back to their families, and live a less martial lifestyle.

China’s barking up the same trees the US was for so many decades before. As long as they fall into the same trap of propping up dictators in return for the oil they need so badly, it’s only a matter of time before they too are targets. After all, China does already have a war on terror. The more they entangle themselves, the more likely this is to become a reality, and unfortunately for China they lack one very important tool that America still has in spades: soft power.

No matter how bad things have gotten for the US, it still has millions of successful Muslim-American immigrants who, despite the problems they/we all may have with our country, will speak highly of it. No matter how tarnished the US’s image gets, people will scramble to come study in its universities, find work in its companies, and eventually apply to be one of its citizens.

While economists may salivate, and pause, over 10 percent GDP growth, nobody dreams of moving their family to a country with 13 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world, where free speech is silenced and corruption is so rampant that it has to ban companies for offering sexual favors to fire department officials for “special protection.”

*NOTE This is not a "China is the root of all evil" article. Nearly every one of the instances brought up in this article could be equally, if not even more facilely, applied to the United States. This is simply an exercise, for me, to look at a side of the war on terror that I've never really studied. I started it as a result of looking into difference between European and American relations with China and Taiwan (because of M. Sarkozy's recent séjour in China). The European, especially French, aspect of that research is in the process of becoming an article.

I'm a firm believer that everything is connected and that too many people view the war on terror, for instance, as Middle East v. West. I think it's much more complicated than that.

I repeat, China is not the root of all evil. Just read the 9-11 Comission Report, Scheuer's books, Robert Baer's See No Evil, and you'll see how much of this stuff America's been involved in.

As usual, I look forward to any criticism.