mikehudack:

abcsoupdot:

From Al Jazeera:

Amid much mutual backslapping and loud calls from the Pakistani president for more Chinese investment in his country’s ravenous energy sector, Zardari and Hu Jintao, his Chinese counterpart, have stayed almost silent on the biggest of their shared concerns.

Neither side was expected to trumpet their blockbuster civilian nuclear agreement, which could knock another hole in the developing world’s non-proliferation regime and lead Islamabad farther down the road away from Washington and towards Beijing. The deal for China to design, build and finance two new nuclear reactors at an estimated cost of nearly $2bn has been out in the open for more than a year, but it is technically forbidden under international rules.

[…]

“Five to six years from now, I think China-Pakistan relations will definitely outweigh US-Pakistan relations, especially because China is willing to invest in sectors outside the military,” Rohit Honawar, a Pakistan analyst for the Mumbai-based Strategic Foresight Group, said. Although many details have yet to emerge from last week’s high-level meetings, the state-owned Associated Press of Pakistan reportedthat China’s Three Gorges Dam Corporation has agreed to invest more than $100bn in hydro-electric projects in Pakistan.

[…]

Washington is hamstrung for a number of reasons when it comes to the impending nuclear deal, observers say.

Foremost is the unprecedented civilian nuclear pact the US made with India in 2005, which flew in the face of much of the previous international consensus and was viewed by many non-proliferation experts as a heavy blow to efforts to control the spread of nuclear technology.

Mark Fitzpatrick, a London-based nuclear policy expert with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said the India deal “set a bad precedent”.

Finally signed in 2008, the agreement required the US and India to negotiate an exemption from embargoes imposed by the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), an international organisation that represents virtually all of the world’s nuclear powers.

It also needed an unprecedented safeguards agreement from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog.

India and Pakistan, which both possess nuclear weapons, are the only countries, aside from Israel, that have not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and Pakistan warned prophetically in 2008 that the India-US deal would set a precedent for them.

[…]

Beijing in particular would like its neighbour to serve as a future energy route, according to Anatol Lieven, a professor at King’s College in London and senior research fellow at the New America Foundation.

“China is very worried that its growing economy is far too dependent on sea-borne energy routes … and that in any future conflict the Indian navy would find it very easy to block those sea routes,” he said in an interview with Russia Today.

“China has been looking at a variety of different overland routes for energy from the Persian Gulf to flow to China, and one of those possibilities, actually it’s becoming a reality, is to build an oil and gas pipeline across Pakistan, along the line of the existing Karakorum Highway across the Himalayas.”

As China pushes the nuclear deal forward this summer, the prevailing wisdom is that the US will struggle to counterbalance its influence and Beijing will have its way.