The move is synchronized with the prospects of a growing new relationship between Afghanistan and the USA following a new diplomatic design, being woven by the President Donald Trump following the withdrawal of troops and two decades of fratricidal war inside the landlocked Afghanistan. National security analysts apprehend that it as a new strategic headache for Washington. Paul D. Shin man, a national security writer says that American intelligence officials ‘believe China will capitalize on ongoing problems in the administration's effort to secure a peace deal with the Taliban and that Beijing will further expand its influence into other contested parts of the region’.

China has for the first time granted the Pakistani Defense Ministry access to one of the most secretive gatherings within its military infrastructure as a show of good faith. ‘Little is known about the Joint Staff Department within China's elite Central Military Commission, including who attends, but access has historically been limited only to senior Chinese leaders. However, as a part of Beijing's realisation it needs Pakistan's experience in neighbouring Afghanistan as well as Islamabad's connections to the insurgent groups operating there who will determine the war-torn country's fate, it has invited a Pakistani general to sit in on its highly restricted meetings as an observer’, states Shinkman.

Beijing and Islamabad have secured pledges from Taliban leaders on refraining from providing safe haven or support to their fellow Muslim Uighurs from neighboring western China. For China, the Muslim Uighurs are already a cause of protracted nightmares.. The intelligence-sharing arrangement far exceeds any accommodation the Afghan insurgent network has ever afforded the USA with regard to Washington's concerns about al-Qaida presence in Afghanistan. Uighur extremists previously looked up to the Taliban in Afghanistan as a potential source of support for an insurgent campaign against Beijing. But China's latest moves turned things upside down. Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, told a small group of reporters in December 2019 shortly after visiting the region that China deployed a battalion of troops across its border into a narrow sliver of land connecting to Afghanistan's extreme northeast as a part of an experiment in working with local forces to determine if future direct partnerships are possible.

This is to be matter of concern for other SAARC countries including India. "The reality is now dawning within the intelligence community," according to a source familiar with the US assessment. "We are now leaving Afghanistan, but who are we leaving it to?" For strategic intelligence experts, based in the USA, Pakistan increasingly fits into China's ambitions for its southern and western border regions. Priorities are shifted from the Beijing’s sides as the latter necessitate more cooperation than before with a limited number of outside countries. "If the Chinese are bringing Pakistan more 'behind the curtain,' in terms of intelligence and military cooperation, it will be tailored to their common interests like confronting India over territorial disputes," states Vikram Singh, a former top official at the Pentagon for South and Southeast Asian affairs, now senior adviser at the U.S. Institute of Peace's Asia Center. "Pakistan's leadership has really backed China on Uighur internment, even though Pakistanis are upset by the repression of Muslims in Xinjiang," he added.

China has bigger regional designs. It has already inked a new military and economic pact with Iran and there are plans to expand areas of new forms of collaboration on intelligence. Now by roping in Pakistan, a dramatic escalation of the partnership is apace. Its spadework began during the Obama years when Islamabad's support for the same terrorist networks that the U.S. was trying to defeat in neighbouring Afghanistan was identified. Washington promptly warned that it would cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Pakistan. But Islamabad was unperturbed.

The Chinese President Xi Jinping felt mounting pressure pertaining to the economic investments China had made in Afghanistan in prior years –especially in mineral wealth costing billions of dollars but left largely inaccessible due to the ongoing violence there. Beijing also faced increasing condemnation the world over for its attempts to clamp down on the Uighurs, native to the part of Xinjiang province in western China that Beijing considers a threat to its unilateral control of the vast nation. (IPA Service)