Will the dream materialise?

Courtesy:- Iftekhar A Khan  

When the prime minister visited China in November and signed pacts of $45.6 billion investment in development projects, the nation had a good reason to be euphoric. Of the committed investment, $33.8 billion is allocated for power generation and $11.8 billion for developing roads and transportation network.

Pakistan and China signed the China-Pak Economic Corridor Agreement, under which China would develop a four-lane road infrastructure from Kashgar to Gwadar, besides setting up power generation plants in the power scarce country. The power plants will generate 16,500MW by 2021. The road transport system will stretch 2700 kilometres from Gwadar to Khunjrab Pass and thereafter into China. The Chinese Premier Li Keqiang during his visit to Pakistan last year called the undertaking a ‘flagship’ and a wonder of the world when completed.

However, there are many impediments in the way of achieving the Pak-China dream of developing an economic corridor. On the China side of the proposed route lies a vast Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region that the Uyghurs – local population – think is part of Turkestan. A low-level insurgency has remained a constant feature there. And in Balochistan, the Baloch chieftains are not amenable to Chinese plans of development in the province. 

Many think the nature has gifted Pakistan with two ideal sites. First is the proposed site of the Kalabagh dam, which though technically feasible in all respects, has fallen victim to politicians’ vagaries; and second, the Gwadar deep-sea port. While the first would only benefit us, the second could open new vistas of economic activity even for the landlocked Central Asian States.

In fact, China had planned to set up an oil refinery at Gwadar to refine crude oil from the Gulf and ship it onward to its mainland through the silk route. The most likely hurdle in materialising the China-Pak economic corridor is whether the western powers would allow it. Will the US allow China unhindered access to Gwadar – the warm water port on the Arabian Sea?

Russian forces marched into Afghanistan in 1979. We, acting as US proxy, resisted them (formation of Taliban etc). Partly, we feared that Russia’s overreach into Afghanistan was part of its larger plan to reach the warm waters through Balochistan. 

We created the Taliban, the freedom fighters that Ronald Reagan then called the mujahideen. It’s another matter though that yesterday’s mujahideens who fought off the Russians in the 1980s were to be re-branded as terrorists a decade plus later when they resisted the west’s occupation of their country.

Interestingly enough, on both occasions when Pakistan decided to carry out US policies in Afghanistan, dictators – Ziaul Haq and Pervez Musharraf – ruled the country. Much that we are reaping now in terms of sectarianism and terrorism are the legacies of these dictators. As part of its policy of containment, the US was loathe to Russian access to warm waters then; could it possibly allow Chinese access to it now?

However, there’s a stark difference between the American and Chinese ways of dealing with other countries. The Americans change regimes of the weaker states to colonise them while the Chinese make ingress by helping them expand their economies and create jobs. The US sells weapons to its allies, since military hardware is all that it produces, but China looks for commercial opportunities and partnership with its allies to benefit both. Sadly, a superpower that exclusively deals in tools of human annihilation would never want peace on the only planet we have.

Nevertheless, our salvation lies in developing Gwadar as an economic hub of the region. No development other than the China-Pak Economic Corridor could turn our national economy around and help alleviate miseries of people living below the poverty line.