Gilani’s Secret Push to Make Karzai Dump US for China

Reports in 2011 that Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani had privately encouraged Afghan President Hamid Karzai to consider China as an alternative strategic patron to the United States — to, in effect, pivot his country's foreign alignment away from Washington — represented a significant, if ultimately unsuccessful, Pakistani diplomatic maneuver at a moment of unusual geopolitical fluidity in the region.

Pakistan's relationship with both the United States and Afghanistan was acutely strained in this period. The Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011 had triggered a crisis in US-Pakistan relations that made the question of Pakistan's ultimate loyalties more openly contested than it had been since the immediate post-9/11 period. Pakistani officials were furious about the violation of sovereignty; American officials were furious about questions regarding Pakistani intelligence's awareness of bin Laden's presence.

In this context, Pakistani encouragement of Afghan-Chinese alignment served several Pakistani interests simultaneously: it would reduce American leverage in Afghanistan, complicate US-India strategic cooperation in the region, and position China — Pakistan's "all-weather friend" — as a more prominent regional player whose interests aligned better with Pakistani preferences than American ones did.

Karzai's response was characteristically non-committal. The Afghan president had spent a decade managing relationships with multiple parties whose interests were only partially compatible with his own and with each other. A direct pivot toward China at that moment would have been strategically dramatic in ways that his government's institutional capacity and security situation couldn't support.

The episode illustrated the multi-layered diplomacy of a region where bilateral relationships between any two parties were always simultaneously negotiations with a third.