As the Taliban faces difficulties in their quest to overtake Afghanistan while maintaining influence in Pakistan, Chinese workers who are carrying out maintenance works at various China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) projects in Pakistan have armed themselves to protect themselves from future attacks.
This trend of Chinese arming themselves comes in the wake of the deadly attack on a bus carrying Chinese engineers to the Dasu dam site in Upper Kohistan in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on July 14, which killed nine Chinese nationals.
This attack either exposed Pakistans failure to protect the Chinese workers or their troops are compromised as the military is highly Islamised.
The Chinese have invested billions of dollars into CPEC and in order to give their engineers and workers protection, Pakistan was told to create two Special Security Divisions (SSDs), with 15,000 troops each. Since maintaining such a large force requires a lot of money, the Pakistan army had asked for and received money for equipping these divisions.
However, that did not stop the insurgents from carrying out attacks leading to the death of their own troops and those they have to protect.
As per reports, many Chinese feel like hostages under constant arm guard, and “this has led to a number of near-riot situations where fistfights have turned ugly, especially when it relates to the Chinese using Pakistani army vehicles to visit and frequent red-light areas”.
There are also serious cases of embezzlement on the part of the Pakistani army involving Chinese money and instead of using the money to protect the Chinese, the money has been used to buy artillery pieces and combat helicopters which are not useful when to comes to human asset protection from terrorists.
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