¿Otro "Great Game" en cierne?

El siglo XIX tuvo su "Great Game" por el control de la Gran Persia. Entre Rusia y Gran Bretaña. Hoy se juega otro. Uno para ver quién retendrá la influencia en Asia Central. ¿Los EEUU o China?

The New Rules: Why the U.S. Should 'Give' Af-Pak to China

Thomas P.M. Barnett | 30 May 2011

Un mapa del "Great Game" del siglo XIX.

Nuclear Pakistan, we are often told, is the Islamic-state equivalent of a Wall Street firm: In geostrategic terms, it is too big to fail. That explains why, even as the Obama administration begins preparing for modest troop withdrawals from Afghanistan this July, it dispatched Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Islamabad last week to smooth over bilateral relations with Pakistan's paranoid regime, which were strained even before the killing of Osama bin Laden. But Clinton's trip and the Obama administration's instinctive embrace of Islamabad is a fool's errand, doomed by history, geography and globalization itself.

In fact, the U.S. should drop the entire Afghanistan-Pakistan mess in China's lap now, while the getting is good, and here are the reasons why:


Over the long haul, the U.S cannot possibly throw as many bodies and bucks at the problem as China can. The U.S. is currently negotiating with both Iraq and Afghanistan regarding a long-term U.S. troop presence, at the same time that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is proposing military pay cuts and the U.S. government is breaking its latest debt ceiling at $14.3 trillion. Meanwhile, cash-rich China, which has already seeded commercial interests throughout Asia and Africa over the past decade, is planning to send $2 trillion overseas in investments over the next 10 years. Moreover, China actually borders both Afghanistan, where it recently plunked down a $3.4 billion investment in a copper mine, and Pakistan, with whom China has almost twice as much trade as America does.

El oso ruso contra el león británico.

Regionalizing the Afghanistan problem is the only solution. Obama-Biden has been no better than Bush-Cheney in this regard. America has discouraged involvement from both Iran, because we fear its growing influence, and India, out of deference to our "ally" Pakistan. At the same time, we imagine ourselves playing some "great game" across Central Asia against Russia, China and their Shanghai Cooperation Organization. As a result, our nation-building effort in Afghanistan takes place in isolation from all of its neighbors, save the one -- Pakistan -- that consistently provides sanctuary to its primary destabilizing elements. In geostrategic terms, it does not get any dumber than this.

A decade from now, the evolution represented by the Arab Spring will be far more crucial to globalization's advance than Afghanistan-Pakistan. With bin Laden dead, al-Qaida's most formidable regional franchises, al-Qaida in the Islamic Mahgreb and al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, now operate in North Africa and the Persian Gulf respectively. Meanwhile, Afghanistan-Pakistan is an amalgam of two "fake states" predestined for Yugoslavian-style partition into several 'Stans -- Pashtunistan, Baluchistan, Punjab, North Afghanistan and so on. The U.S. can either continue getting sucked into this thankless and bloody devolutionary process or focus on post-Mubarak Egypt, the emerging slog that is Libya, Syria's unrest, Palestine-Israel, Iran's growing divisions and reformation of the Gulf monarchies, among other pressing regional issues. Ask yourself, Which situation seems more primed for progress, and which is more likely a quagmire? Then ask yourself, Which situation better incentivizes our aging and semi-bankrupt European allies toward sustained engagement and an ultimate solution?

Hopefully the Sino-American military rivalry won't lead to conflict, but why take chances? Yes, there are a lot of strategic thinkers on both sides who find the presumed inevitably of conflict between the U.S. and China to be nothing less than sheer madness. But with bin Laden's death consummating the Pentagon's "long war" and with budget pressures looming, that building's big-war constituency desperately needs a "near-peer" successor. That's a profile that plenty of China's know-nothing generals are eager to embrace. While our bilateral military-to-military cooperation remains permanently stuck in first gear, both sides are pursuing an open arms race in East Asia, with China building and buying like crazy and America strategizing and selling arms like crazy. Given that dynamic, why should America be in the business of arming China's most trusted military ally, Pakistan, or securing China's resource-grab in Afghanistan?

With China's resource requirements skyrocketing, why not let it pay its own way? China has already overtaken the U.S. as the biggest energy consumer in the world, and by 2030 it will surpass us as the biggest importer of oil. More than half of Persian Gulf oil output now heads to East Asia, primarily to China, while the region is no higher than fifth on the list of the United States' regional sources of oil. Meanwhile, Pakistan has now invited China to build a naval base in its strategically located Gwadar port, as the logical extension of Beijing's alleged "string of pearls" naval basing strategy. Should Americans be frightened by this? No, but it shouldn't be American blood defending China's oil interests, either. America has defended the Persian Gulf's "open door" on energy for decades now, but we can not do that ad infinitum. Nor can we block China's efforts to do the same. Indeed, if the vast bulk of the region's oil already flows eastward, what exactly are we preventing here?

If we truly fear China's global military rise, then we should burden it now with Afghanistan-Pakistan. As a combo, it's hard to pick two worse economic basket cases than Afghanistan and Pakistan. Factor in the political-military costs and it's easy to see the attractiveness of taking a huge ongoing American/NATO liability and turning it into a Chinese one. And if ties with Kabul and Islamabad make Beijing more confident regarding its access to resources, all the better: That will provide the necessary incentive for China to tackle the threat of Islamic radicalism and nuclear terrorism that both countries represent, as much if not more so to China than to us. After all, both countries actually border China, right on its restive Muslim province of Xinjiang.

If we truly want to educate China on what being a global superpower entails, Afghanistan-Pakistan is the perfect classroom. To date, China has sidestepped a lot of the responsibilities that come from "fake states" -- featuring colonial-era borders, failed governments, sustainability issues and insurgencies -- by just paying off the local generals and warlords. We already know how little that buys you in Afghanistan-Pakistan, so the learning process here will be substantive -- for both sides. Soviet Russia raced up that learning curve by propping up Third World "countries of socialist orientation" and Afghanistan in the late-1970s and early 1980s. But that effort subsequently triggered Moscow's worldwide strategic withdrawal, culminating in the Soviet empire's collapse. If Afghanistan-Pakistan doesn't do the same for China, at the very least it will educate the Chinese masses regarding the burdens of China's growing resource dependencies, thereby ending the illusion of the free lunch.

It would allow India to redirect its attention from Pakistan to China. Pakistan's long-cherished "strategic depth" in Afghanistan is a decidedly antiquated concept when measured against today's military capabilities, which India is stockpiling at an even faster rate than Pakistan. But at least India finances its own buildup, whereas Pakistan diverts U.S. aid to that end. The Economist recently called the frontier between the two neighbors "the world's most dangerous border." Now Pakistan is busy trying to field tactical nuclear weapons, a move that India will undoubtedly match. And America is not only funding this arms race, it is funding the wrong side of it. Moving forward, India is the natural Eurasian balancer to China, making it logically America's best friend in that delicate hedging process. So why divert New Delhi from that effort by funding the military buildup of its archenemy?

That leads to the ultimate reason for divesting ourselves of the Afghanistan-Pakistan burden and all the strategic compromises that go along with it: It's time to plainly and clearly pick India over Pakistan. India will dominate the post-2030 global landscape, along with China and the U.S. No other superpower wannabes need apply to that G-3 nucleus. And whereas China will at that point be on the steep downward slope of its now-exhausted "demographic dividend," India's rise will continue at full throttle deep into the 21st century. America has a long history of backing the up-and-comer against the regional bully, but Washington is using the wrong lens on this one: Rather than pick Pakistan over India, we're better off picking India over China. "Giving" China the responsibility of stabilizing both Afghanistan and Pakistan will allow us to do so.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is chief analyst at Wikistrat and a contributing editor for Esquire magazine. His latest book is "Great Powers: America and the World After Bush" (2009). His weekly WPR column, The New Rules, appears every Monday. Reach him and his blog at thomaspmbarnett.com.