Tarola

military considerations whatsoever (see, for example, National Development and Reform Commission et al. 2015). Whether this claim is true or not is not the con- cern of this thesis, as its structural realist framework assumes that the interna- tional structure if defined by capabilities and not intentions. Even purely eco- nomic and infrastructural projects may have significant implications for the mili- tary balance between states, and this is especially the case in regions where ter- rain is as difficult as the mountainous region between South Asia and the Eura- sian mainland. Geography, overall, is not a ‘permanent, unchanging factor’; ra- ther, technology ‘routinely’ changes how it affects international relations (Cohen 2015: 345). Road, railroad, and airfield constructions in this region have been for long a source of frictions between China and India, the most serious such case being a Chinese road construction in Aksai Chin that led to the 1962 war, and the most recent being the 2017 Dokhlam Standoff.

Despite the highly contentious status of the two countries’ borderlands along the so-called ‘Line of Actual Control’ (LAC), China and India are not at the forefronts of each other’s defence policies. The bulk of China’s People’s Libera- tion Army (PLA) is located in the more populous eastern areas (Joshi 2011a: 561– 562; ISS 2018: 228), and even the PLA’s Xinjaing Military District and Xizang (Ti- bet) Army Group, to which the disputed areas belong, are also tasked with the handling of possible Uyghur and Tibetan insurgencies. On the Indian side, bor- der forces are overstretched because of the permanent implicit threat coming from Pakistan and the Kashmir Valley (Holslag 2009: 820–821).

The BRI does not reach directly the Tibetan Plateau; therefore it has no di- rect implications for the military balance in the Eastern Sector of the Sino-Indian LAC. The CPEC, however, significantly expands the already existing land connec- tion between China and Pakistan, and therefore allegedly threatens India with tilting the military balance to its disadvantage in Kashmir (disputed between In-

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dia, Pakistan, and partially also China) and along the Indo-Pakistani border and the Indo-Pakistani Line of Control (LOC). (For the CPEC, projected on the re- gion’s physical map, see Map 3.)

The entrance point and backbone of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor in Pakistan is the Karakoram Highway, which connects the two countries on land since 1979. This route was used to provide Pakistan with materials for its nuclear programme, to support the Taliban during the 1979–1989 Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, and to ship U.S. weaponry to China for reverse engineering (Gupta 2015). Further developing the Highway into an all-weather land route would cer- tainly enhance China’s ability to aid the Pakistani military, measuring the exact change is, however, difficult to impossible, as there is no certainty even regarding the road’s current capacity. According to Indian sources, the road is capable of transmitting ‘heavy vehicles’ (Dutt 2015), but it is debated whether its bridges can carry tanks, and if they can, what types and sizes. Neither is there certain infor- mation about whether the new construction works would definitely allow for such logistical tasks.

Another possible way the BRI could alter the balance of military power to India’s disadvantage was a massive Chinese deployment along the CPEC. The In- do-Pakistani border is one of the world’s most heavily militarised areas. While the exact location of either sides’ forces is uncertain, the entire Pakistani Army has 560,000 troops in active service (ISS 2018: 291), much of which are prepared to fight against India. The Indian Army, numbering 1,200,000 active troops (ISS 2018: 260), is geographically more widely distributed, but is also focused on a possible conflict with Pakistan and/or in Kashmir. Of the Indian Army’s six oper- ational commands three (the Northern, Western, and South Western) with around 17 corps are located in Pakistan’s and the POK’s relative proximity (Global Security 2018b). According to Pande (2017: 434), approximately 500-700,000 Indi- an troops are stationing at the Indo-Pakistani border and the LOC. Following the lines set in the methodological section, these are the numbers to which the size of a possible Chinese troop deployment should be compared in order to decide

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how much it changes the balance of military power in the China–India–Pakistan triangle.

Limited Chinese military presence in Pakistan is historically confirmed: in the past Beijing deployed security forces in the Pakistani occupied/administered part of Kashmir (POK) in order to secure Chinese workers and assets involved in the construction of the Karakoram Highway (Brewster 2017: 286). The protection of Chinese nationals against militant elements in Pakistan is a key issue also in the most recent phase of CPEC’s development, as related installations provide an easy target for militants with high symbolic value (Ratner 2018: 4–5). The Paki- stani Government already announced the creation of a two-divisions strong spe- cial security force dedicated to this mission (ISS 2018: 291). The possibility of fur- ther Chinese deployments in the region (as well as in Myanmar) is pondered in the literature (Brewster 2017: 286), but no such move has been confirmed by Chi- nese Government. ISS (2018: 259) knows of no Chinese deployment in Pakistan. Even if China deployed a number of troops similar to Pakistan’s own aforemen- tioned special security units, however, it would be dwarfed by the size of Indian and Pakistani troops already located in the broader region.

On balance, existing official announcements, news sources, military anal- yses, and academic literature strongly support the notion that China’s ability to deploy troops or support the Pakistani military would be enhanced by the newly expanded Karakoram Highway. On the other hand, they neither provide very precise figures about how much this capacity changes, nor any proof, apart from speculations, for Chinese troop deployments already being initiated in the re- gion. These factors lead to the conclusion that while the direction of changes caused by the BRI in the balance of land forces is certainly disadvantageous for India, the degree of this disadvantageous change cannot be determined without further information being published about the exact capacity of the transporta- tion facilities that together constitute the CPEC.

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