Pakistani Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi on Wednesday announced the creation of a new “special police unit” in Islamabad that will be dedicated to protecting Chinese nationals from terrorist attacks.
“The protection of Chinese citizens and projects of mutual interest remains our top priority,” said Naqvi, which might have been a somewhat irksome statement of priorities to the ears of Pakistanis, but fortunately he was in Beijing when he said it.
“We appreciate Pakistan’s sacrifices in the fight against terrorism,” replied Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong, who met with Naqvi at the Ministry of Public Security for the big announcement.
Wang and Naqvi pledged to work together on “joint strategy for training and enhancing the professional skills of police and security personnel,” developing a rapid response system for terrorist attacks, and maintaining an “exchange of information between the police and other institutions of the two countries.”
China has a large number of workers and executives in Pakistan, employed by projects connected to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its massive umbrella project, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).
CPEC was launched in 2015, and includes projects worth about $62 billion – a massive Chinese investment in Pakistan’s unsteady economy. Chinese and Pakistani officials tend to be evasive about exactly what CPEC includes, and Pakistani political and media figures who ask too many questions tend to have unhappy fates.
One example is Imran Khan, the former prime minister of Pakistan, currently parked in jail with dozens of criminal cases pending against him. Khan had second thoughts about CPEC after he took office in 2018, questioning whether the massive debts incurred to China were worth the benefits of the infrastructure projects, and he accused some Pakistani politicians of taking payoffs from China. Khan’s interference with CPEC was one of the reasons Pakistan’s powerful military-intelligence complex turned against him. He was booted from office by a no-confidence vote in 2022 and jailed amid his attempt at a political comeback in 2023.
CPEC is also of keen interest to the Islamist insurgents who want to overthrow Pakistan’s secular government, and the separatists of impoverished and unstable Balochistan. Chinese nationals became frequent targets of terrorist attacks, and Beijing has long demanded the Pakistani government do more to protect its people.
Radio Free Europe (RFE) on Thursday counted 20 Chinese nationals killed and 34 injured in terrorist attacks in Pakistan since 2021.
Pakistan previously dispatched an army brigade to Balochistan, the restless province where some big CPEC projects are under construction, to assuage China’s concerns. Pakistan also created a 15,000-member Special Security Division in 2017 that was primarily intended to protect Chinese workers and CPEC projects.
Pakistani sources told RFE the new police unit was a further attempt to satisfy Beijing, and probably a symbolic gesture, as Pakistan lacks the resources to develop a formidable counter-terrorism unit that could protect the thousands of Chinese working in Pakistan.
“CPEC has not just slowed down, it is almost dead,” one former Pakistani official said, citing financial and organizational problems in addition to the security situation.
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