The battle for Pakistan

CHINA and the US are on a collision course over

Chinese plans to build two nuclear reactors in Pakistan.

This is despite the country's chronic political instability and history of selling nuclear secrets to North Korea, Iran and Libya.

China is expected to formally announce the plans to build the 650-megawatt reactors in Punjab province at a meeting in New Zealand of the Nuclear Suppliers Group - the 46 countries that dominate and try to control the world's atomic trade.

The US has already voiced its disapproval before the meeting, which starts today, and will try to forge a consensus on updating the rules designed to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

US officials say that the plan requires special exemption from the NSG, which China joined in 2004, as Pakistan has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and could, therefore, divert some technology to its nuclear weapons program or to another country.

China and Pakistan disagree, pointing out that the US set a precedent by sealing a deal to sell civilian nuclear fuel and technology to India in 2006, even though Delhi had yet to sign the treaty.

That deal, which lifted a US ban imposed after India tested its first nuclear device in 1974, was seen as the cornerstone of a new partnership with Delhi designed to counterbalance China's influence in Asia. However, critics say that it undermined the international non-proliferation regime.

Having muscled the Indian deal through the NSG in 2008, the US is likely to struggle to forge a consensus against China's deal with Pakistan. "Because Washington pressed the NSG and China to exempt India from NSG trade sanctions, it is now more difficult to complain about China's desire to export reactors to Pakistan," said Mark Hibbs, a nuclear expert at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The dispute could also complicate US-led efforts to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb, since any multilateral action requires China's support in the UN Security Council.

China has had close relations with Pakistan since the 1960s and had already built one reactor and started a second at Chashma, in Punjab, before joining the NSG. It signed the deal to build another two reactors at Chashma in February but is expected to argue that it does not need NSG exemption as it was agreed before 2004.

The US did not protest when the deal first came to light but, after intense lobbying from India, it said last week that it had asked China to "clarify the details".

The US has grave concerns about proliferation - especially since Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan's top nuclear scientist, confessed in 2004 to selling nuclear secrets to North Korea, Iran and Libya.

Washington also worries about the potential for Islamic militants to attack or capture Pakistani nuclear sites. Last year, Pakistani police said they found a map of Chashma in the possession of five American Muslims arrested for plotting a terrorist attack.

China responded to the US statement last week by insisting that its nuclear co-operation with Pakistan was for peaceful purposes and under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Pakistan said that the deal was needed to help ease chronic power shortages that have caused long blackouts across the country for much of this year.

China’s decision to expand its nuclear cooperation with Pakistan in defiance of the international norms and the American reluctance to vigorously challenge it, underline the unique value of the Pakistan army for Beijing and Washington.

Further, the many challenges of our time — the changing relationship between a China that believes in its own unstoppable rise and a United States that is brooding about its relative decline, the spread of nuclear weapons, and the challenge of violent religious extremism — all come together in Pakistan.

The American and Chinese stakes in the relationship with the Pakistan army headquarters in Rawalpindi are high and rising amidst the expectations of a rapid political evolution in the Af-Pak theatre in the near future and gathering confrontation between Iran and the West. Whichever great power can shape the politics of the territories along and across the Indus that the Pakistan army holds will gain a decisive influence over the developments in the subcontinent, inner Asia and the Persian Gulf and the orientation of violent religious extremism.