ARTICLE: China showcasing its softer side, By Andrew Higgins, Washington Post, December 2, 2009

The PLA loves to portray its military buildup as essentially peaceful:

The engineering unit that staged the show is spearheading China's growing involvement in international peacekeeping, a cause that Beijing for decades denounced as a violation of its stated commitment to noninterference in the affairs of other nations but that it now embraces. Today, about 2,150 Chinese military and police personnel are deployed in support of U.N. missions. They serve around the world, from Haiti to Sudan.

And while these details are wonderfully true, it's also clear that China builds past any deterrent requirement vis-a-vis the U.S. and remains intransigent on a key PKO operation right on its western border:

But while increasingly willing to let its soldiers don the blue helmets worn by U.N. peacekeepers, China has shown little enthusiasm for the U.N.-sanctioned mission that currently matters most to Washington -- the war in Afghanistan. Wariness toward NATO When the United States wanted to fly a group of Mongolian trainers to Afghanistan in October, China objected to letting the aircraft go over its territory. Beijing eventually gave the flight a green light -- but only after ammunition was taken off the plane, according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter. Though authorized by the United Nations, the Afghanistan mission is led by NATO, an organization China views with deep wariness. Beijing blames NATO for the 1999 bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo war. China's shock at NATO's military campaign in the former Yugoslavia helped prod Beijing into playing a bigger role in U.N. peacekeeping, said Bates Gill, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and co-author of a recent report on China's peacekeeping activities. China, he said, is "highly unlikely" to send soldiers to Afghanistan to help "what is essentially a NATO operation, albeit with a United Nations blessing."

Of course, our great answer is to keep the operation as NATO-y as possible, because these countries are seen as the only logical source of additional peacekeepers beyond our own. Nice chicken-and-egg bit, yes? But it highlights the basic conundrum we've long faced: we need to wean ourselves off our old allies and move in the direction of new ones, but the Cold War's institutions here are more hindrance than help. Then again, where is the major FDI from Europe in Afghanistan? Ain't there. Instead it comes from China and increasingly India. But, of course, the future demands a "stronger NATO"! It'll be interesting to see how that dream fares with the Obama-Gates surge in Afghanistan over the next 18 months.