'Himalayan Quad': is China about to start its own security bloc with Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan?

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Earlier this month, Yury Yarmolinsky, an analyst with the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Research, wrote in an article published by India's Observer Research Foundation that recent developments could in theory "push Beijing to institutionalise the Himalayan Quad project involving China, Nepal, Pakistan, and Afghanistan as a counterweight to the Quad."

When contacted by This Week in Asia, Yarmolinsky said he had primarily relied on the views of Jagannath Panda, a research fellow and East Asia Centre coordinator at the Delhi-based Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, who used the term "Himalayan Quad" in a November article titled "The Trans-Himalayan 'Quad,' Beijing's Territorialism, and India". 

"As long as Canbera, New Delhi, Tokyo and Washington do not cross certain red lines ... in the context of Beijing's national interests, the theory will remain a theory," he said.

AN EXISTING FRAMEWORK?

"Nepal is a strong foothold in the Himalayas in the context of the Sino-Indian territorial dispute," Yarmolinsky said, adding that "Afghanistan is a significant factor in ensuring security and maintaining stability in Xinjiang [with which it shares a 76km-long border]."

China's defence ministry said in 2018 that it was supporting and strengthening Afghanistan's defence and counterterrorism efforts - with Beijing providing more than US$70 million in military aid to the Afghan government from 2016 to 2018, according to Afghan researchers.

Mark N. Katz, a government and politics professor at George Mason University in the US, described Pakistan as "willing and able to ally with China", given Islamabad's anti-US stance that has arisen from American military actions undertaken on Pakistani soil in the name of the "war on terror".

"China's 'Himalayan Quad' is intended to balance out India's outreach in the region," he said. "As Beijing looks to expand its influence in South Asia, it will likely make more efforts to initiate a regular Himalayan Quad dialogue with these countries, with a long-term aim to institutionalise it."

Though such a Chinese Quad remains a "remote possibility" at present - and is unlikely to ever match its US-led counterpart in terms of strength - Panda said that "considering the growing synergy between the Quad, the emergence of a Beijing-led alliance in the region is not out of the question."

 UNRELIABLE ALLIES

While many of the countries listed above are friendly with China, their relatively weak economies, poor military capabilities and own sets of domestic problems and challenges would not necessarily make them good allies, analysts said.

As a small nation sandwiched between two giants, "Nepal will try to avoid making a firm choice of allying with one against the other", George Mason University's Katz said, though he did note that Kathmandu had been pushed closer to Beijing in recent years by Delhi's "overbearing attitude".

"So unless China is prepared to massively support it after the US leaves, working with Kabul may only alienate the Taliban unnecessarily," Katz said.

The politics professor said China might be willing to work with the Taliban, so long as it did not offer support to Uygur Islamists.

"Even if the Taliban say that they won't support Uygur groups, the emotional desire to do so will prove too great for some, if not all," Katz said, adding that China's relations with the Taliban - whether it rules all or just parts of Afghanistan in future - "will be inherently difficult".

Of all the possible partners China could ally itself with to form an alternative Quad, Russia is perhaps the strongest - yet despite sharing a "common American adversary", Katz said many in Moscow view Beijing as more of a long-term challenge than the West. 

BETTER OFF ALONE?

While China could create its own version of Quad, Bunn Nagara, a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies in Malaysia, said Beijing "can do much better for itself than that by improving its regional relations with far better conduct in the East and South China Seas".

Yarmolinsky from the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Research said that instead of forging tough alliances which are "relics of the past", most countries including China might prefer "comfortable situational alliances with an economic basis".

"The more allies there are, the more stable one or another regional security architecture is," he said.

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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