Fresh sanctions on Pakistan’s missile programme show US is ‘waking up’ to the growing threat it poses

Despite changing global equations, there is little clarity on the impact the sanctions, which have proved largely ineffective in the past, will have on the China-Pakistan relationship.

Representational image: Pakistan conducting a test fire of its submarine launched cruise missile 'Babur' in 2018 | X: @OfficialDGISPR

Washington DC: Eleven weeks after clouds of dust rose from the Baluchistan desert—signalling the arrival of a new nuclear power—a cruise missile ploughed unexploded into the dry sands near the ancient caravanserai and oasis of Kharan. The state-of-the-art Tomahawk missile, one of two duds from a salvo of 75 fired in 1998 by the United States against jihadist training camps in Afghanistan, was soon on its way to Beijing. There, the technology was used to develop China’s DH-10 cruise missiles, and sold back to Pakistan where it became the “Babur”.

Following new sanctions on the National Development Complex, the military conglomerate at the heart of Pakistan’s missile programme, it is clear that the US is going to war against the proliferation of technologies, which pose a strategic threat to it. The Tomahawk theft had no consequences for either Pakistan or China, but the rise of a new Cold War is changing global equations.

Less clear, though, is how much impact sanctions, which have proved largely ineffective in the past, will actually have on the China-Pakistan missile relationship.

The sanctions bar the companies from exporting to the US, or applying for government-funded contracts, for two years—penalties that are primarily futile because the state-owned corporations involved have few or no commercial ties in the US.

“America’s non-proliferation bureaucracy is waking up from a very long slumber where Pakistan is concerned,” said Sumit Ganguly, an American political scientist and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “With the United States’ reliance on Pakistan at a low ebb, it is possible for them to have a relatively free hand to act.”

Equipment is, however, continuing to flow from China for the testing and development of the large diameter rocket engines, which power Pakistan’s medium-range Shaheen-III and Ababeel missiles, official sources in Washington told ThePrint.

In spite of facing similar sanctions, North Korea has succeeded in developing high-thrust rocket engines, which would enable its nuclear weapons to reach the continental United States.

The sanctions—meant to slow down work on systems with the potential to penetrate American missile defences, and to target its bases and shipping in the Indian Ocean region—mark a dramatic reversal in a decades-old policy of turning a blind eye to missile proliferation involving Pakistan.

To work, though, they will need to inflict enough economic pain on Beijing’s clients to compel them to sever ties.

‘Threat’ to America

The sanctions against missile technology proliferation to Pakistan are not new, even if they received unusual media attention this time around. In September, American sanctions were imposed on four Chinese conglomerates involved in the testing and development of large diameter rocket engines used to power Pakistan’s Shaheen III and Ababeel ballistic ballistic missiles. The sanctions also targeted the enigmatic Luo Dongmei, a technologist and entrepreneur leading the project.

An earlier round of sanctions announced in April targeted a supplier in Belarus, which provides the multi-axle vehicles used to transport the missiles, as well as Chinese technology companies.

The stated purpose of the Shaheen III, with a claimed range of 2,750 kilometres, is to target Indian naval facilities in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The ongoing work on its engines, the official sources said, is to expand that range, since the missiles can only currently reach their targets, if fired from Pakistan’s extreme east.

Efforts to expand the range of the Ababeel, which can deliver multiple missile-defence evading nuclear warheads to some 2,000 kilometres, are also ongoing.

Evolving from its origins in the stolen American Tomahawk, the Babur III has been developed into a submarine-launched cruise missile, which is claimed to be able to deliver a nuclear warhead to an estimated 450 kilometres. The flat trajectory of cruise missiles makes their launch relatively hard to detect and difficult to interdict.

Last week, US Deputy National Security Adviser Jon Finer said that Pakistan’s work on long-range missiles could eventually give it “the capability to strike targets well beyond South Asia, including in the United States”. “Candidly, it’s hard for us to see Pakistan’s actions as anything other than an emerging threat to the United States,” he said in a speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“The prospect of a Pakistani missile being able to reach the continental United States isn’t a short-term one,” one official in Washington said. “But what Pakistan has already puts our bases in the Indian Ocean, like Bahrain and Mogadishu, within its reach. The missiles are also a threat to allies like Israel and to United States’ naval assets. The possibility that this technology could end up in the hands of regimes hostile to America, like Iran, is a real one.”

Even though disgraced Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan’s enterprise to sell nuclear weapons-related technology to Iran, Iraq, Libya and North Korea was shut down in 2004, rogue states, like Iran and North Korea, continue to acquire equipment through networks of suppliers, financiers and intermediaries, experts say.

In addition, Pakistan is one of the 13 countries named by the Pentagon as likely sites for Chinese naval assets and logistical units to be positioned in case of a future military conflict.

China’s missile proliferation

Even though China is not a member of the Missile Technology Control Regime—a 37-member export control alliance, which includes India—it has long committed to abide by its rules. Yet, according to an official report to Congress, Chinese state-owned and private-sector firms “supply MTCR-controlled items to missile programs of proliferation concern, including those in Iran, North Korea, Syria and Pakistan”.

In a 2023 report, the US said that despite requests to China to “investigate and put a stop to such activities, most of these cases remain unresolved”.

Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Alex Wong asserted in November 2020 that “China hosts no less than two dozen North Korean WMD and ballistic missile procurement representatives and bank representatives”. 

“The real problem is…how do you make sanctions painful enough that China chooses to comply with the MTCR, and what can you do to inflict enough pressure on customers not to buy,” one official said.

In June 1991, the US had accused China of exporting M-11 missile technology to Pakistan and imposed mandatory sanctions, which were subsequently lifted on 23 March, 1992 after China agreed to abide by the MTCR regime.

In 1993, the US again found China to have shipped M-11 missile equipment to Pakistan and imposed sanctions. These did not, however, retard China-Pakistan cooperation on other missile systems.

Sanctions had, similarly, been placed on Pakistan’s NDC in 1998 by President Bill Clinton because of the missile proliferation risks, as part of a package of sanctions which followed the country’s nuclear-weapons tests. Those sanctions were waived after 9/11, however, to enable American counter-terrorism cooperation with Pakistan— a cooperation that never fully materialised.