Actually, the latest irritant shouldn’t have been aerial reconnoitering, but China’s upset win - trumping formidable rivals like the US, Canada and Russia - in the massive Afghan tender for copper mines. But the strategic community in Delhi doesn’t know, as the Indian media kept it in the dark.

The news from the Hindu Kush would have made Indian thinkers pull their hair in despair. China has never been a player in Afghanistan in modern history. Indeed, it is a needless provocation on the part of the Chinese to be so utterly fearless of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. While India prides itself as a major donor for Afghan reconstruction - building roads, bridges, hospitals, a Parliament building and even, intriguingly, public toilets - China marches ahead and wins the tender for the Aynak cooper deposit in Afghanistan’s Logar province bordering Kabul, which is billed as one of the world’s largest copper mines

But the mother of all Chinese encirclement of India still remains largely unnoticed in Delhi - the Beijing-Tehran axis. There is wide recognition that if the United States hasn’t been able to push through another tougher United Nations Security Council resolution against Iran over its nuclear program, that has been largely because of China’s reluctance to concur.

But what happened last Sunday still came as a bolt from the blue. China Petroleum Corporation, better known as the Sinopec Group, signed a contract with the Iranian Oil Ministry for the development of the Yadavaran oil and gas fields in southwestern Iran.

The current estimation is that the project cost will be $2 billion. Under the contract, China will make the entire investment necessary to develop the fields. The first phase is to produce 85,000 barrels of oil per day and the second phase will add another 100,000 barrels. According to Iranian estimates, Yadavaran has in place oil reserves of 18.3 billion barrels and gas reserves amounting to 12.5 trillion cubic feet.

Iran is already China’s third-largest supplier of crude oil, but the Iranians are simply delighted. Oil Minister Gholam-Hossein Nozari was quick to point out that the deal with China flies in the face of Washington’s attempts to block foreign investments in Iran. Sinopec merely said, “We are very happy to sign this contract … China is willing to buy LNG [liquefied natural gas] from Iran and we hope to talk about an LNG project later.”

The Sino-Iranian deal has been closed within a week of the US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear program, which has conclusively debunked any conspiracies hatched by the neo-conservative coterie within the George W Bush administration for launching a military strike against Iran. Beijing has indeed moved fast.

But what stands out is that Beijing anticipated a long time ago the inevitability of precisely such a u-turn in US policy towards Iran. More important, it began plotting how it could take optimal advantage when the Iran question inexorably moved toward its denouement. Beijing estimated that time was of the essence. Beijing could visualize a day when Tehran would have competing customers from the Western world seeking access to its oil and gas.