President Vladimir Putin announced that India and Pakistan would join the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a group dominated by Russia and China and also including former Soviet republics in Central Asia. Pakistan’s full membership to the powerful SCO was approved by its Council of Heads of State at its 15th Summit.Russia sees the organisation, expanding for the first time since its creation in 2001, as a counterweight to Western alliances. The SCO started off as group designed to improve security from terrorist threats in Central Asian nations, but it is rapidly developing into a more inclusive group, with increasing economic and military cooperation between its members. It is unsurprising that analysts see it as a counterbalance to NATO and the West. This is an impression that the SCO has emphasised with Russia and China holding NATO-style war games near the Ural Mountains in 2007, and in Kazakhstan in 2010. With the inclusion of two South Asian military powers in the shape of India and Pakistan, the group can legitimately throw its weight in global matters – assuming that its members can work together.Pakistan and India’s troubled relations remain a hurdle that prevents the group from truly operating as a cohesive unit but It is to be hoped that finding themselves at the same table in the SCO produces more in terms of bilateral easement for India and Pakistan than has the membership of Saarc, an organisation that performs below its potential, in part, because of the shared animosities of the two countries. The internal dynamics of the SCO are driven by China and Russia. China has already and very recently made it clear to India that the CPEC is none of India’s business, and Russia is likely to view the CPEC development as to its own advantage as well, it being another network that will be ‘plug and play’ for the export of energy resources, among other things.
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