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Sino-Indian military exercise : Pak worries |
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Clearly worried about proposed joint military exercises by India and China, including those focussed on combating terrorism, a top Pakistani official has said such operations should not cross the “red lines”.
“Pakistan supports joint efforts to combat the scourge of international terrorism but believes that in such endeavour no red lines should be crossed,” Dawn newspaper reported, quoting an unnamed official.
He was commenting on the reported decision by New Delhi and Beijing during the Indian Army Chief’s visit to China to undertake exercises that will enable them to train their personnel for joint military operations.
Dawn said Pakistan had formally proposed to India, at the Foreign Secretary-level talks in Islamabad, prior notification of military exercises and urged it not to conduct joint exercises with any third country in disputed areas.
Another Pakistani official said, given the “maturity” of the Chinese leadership, it was unlikely that it would go in for joint drills with India in any disputed territory.
“We are confident that China will never cross red lines or take any step in this regard after due scrutiny,” the official asserted.
But the paper said indications from China were contrary. And it quoted a Chinese source in Islamabad as saying that Beijing was likely to go ahead with the proposed military exercises with India.
“China thinks such manoeuvres cannot be harmful given that the two countries have not had military confrontation for two decades,” the source said.
And the source noted that all members of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), which includes China and India, conduct joint counter-terrorism exercises from time to time.
A Chinese strategic expert in Islamabad remarked: “We hope in future Pakistan and India will also have joint counter-terrorism manoeuvres.”
China has given assurances to Pakistan several times that growing Sino-India relations are not being built at the expense of Islamabad, maintaining that there was a qualitative difference between the two sets of relationships, the paper said.
“Sino-Pakistan relations, the Chinese government maintains, have a separate and unique trajectory stemming from decades of strategic cooperation. Pakistan and China in the past three years have had close cooperation on counter-terrorism,” it said.
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