Jahangir's World Times First Comprehensive Magazine for students/teachers of competitive exams and general readers as well.
There is a crucial connection between means and ends in the projection of global influence. For instance, the Suez Canal, which opened in 1869, acted as a tool of empire for the great powers of the nineteenth century. The building of a canal through the Sinai Peninsula not only made trade and empire in Asia faster by avoiding the Cape of Good Hope, but more economical too.
The Suez was an important strategic consideration in Britain’s imperial outlook, making the transport of goods, officials and soldiers to Bombay and other key colonial hubs easier and affordable. The Suez Canal acted as a ‘tool of empire,’ and in a small but important way, the world became that much more global’ all to the benefit of those Western nations that could harness the power of the sea. Even today, the laws of economic scale dictate that air and rail will always be poor cousins to the efficiency and capacity of container ships and waterborne trade.
Despite the fact that the free-trade zone port of Gwadar in Balochistan has been an unprofitable enterprise with operational control now in Chinese hands, its potential remains. The development of this deep ocean port and an associated international airport along with the creation of a transport corridor connecting Gwadar to China’s Xinjiang province is a game-changer for Central Asia. Recently, Pakistani President Mamnoon Hussain and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping signed a series of agreements designed to breathe life to the corridor project. In the coming years, the once sleepy fishing enclave of Gwadar will become a staging ground for the geopolitical reorganization of the region.
With the development of the corridor, Central Asia, traditionally an economically closed region owing to its geography and lack of infrastructure, will have greater access to the sea and to the global trade network. For Afghanistan and Tajikistan, it will provide a more economical means of transportation, making their export products more competitive globally. The corridor will provide China with direct access to the Indian Ocean, obligating its strategic entry into the mineral and oil-rich Western Asia and Africa (and beyond). The project as well provides Pakistan not only a third deep sea port but also a better connected gateway into China’s backyard. Thus, it will enable Pakistan to exploit its potential to make good on its free trade agreement with the dragon economy.
This project makes Pakistan a complicit satellite in China’s attempt to thwart the US pivot to Asia. This ‘String of Pearls’ looks much like a noose around Southeastern Asia as far as India and the US are concerned. India, in particular, has looked on with continued unease at the Pakistan-China corridor and port in terms of its effect on the maritime balance of power in the Indian Ocean. Ideally, if regional relations were better, the corridor would be a circuit linking the three economic powerhouses of the region, China, Pakistan, and India as well as Iran for that matter.
Nevertheless, the corridor will play a crucial role in augmenting Pakistan’s economic power. Exporting, transiting, and transporting goods into and out of Central Asia and carrying them away on the current of the world’s sea lanes, the Pakistan-China corridor will be a vital factor in Pakistan’s economic future. The corridor is a comprehensive infrastructure package encompassing a wide range of spinoffs, including gas and oil pipelines, railways, an expressway from Karachi to Lahore, fiber-optic cabling, metro bus and underground services for key Pakistani cities.
However, it is the same circular argument. The security situation must improve and reform, both economic and social, is required if the future economic prosperity of Pakistan is to be guaranteed. Whether Nawaz Sharif and his team have the technocratic and entrepreneurial acumen to develop a bold economic strategy out of the corridor is unclear. For Pakistan’s ruling elites, there is a tendency to think purely in terms of developing heavy industries and of state-owned enterprises.’
In reality, agriculture, chemicals, textiles, and various other manufactured items are the stuff of Pakistan’s true productivity’ items that are tradable on the global market and capable of boosting national income. Pakistan has always been well placed to export given its access to the Indian Ocean and proximity to key markets in the West and East, let alone its international reach through the Pakistani diaspora and the fact that it has the third largest English-speaking population in the world. Despite government’s failure to eradicate the terrorism that routinely thwarts Pakistan’s potential as well as rampant inflation and a serious lack of currency reserves, country’s private sector has proven resilient ‘ capable of going in for global trade with the right encouragement. The cue is now for the Pakistani government and the business community to formulate a more global economic policy.
Pakistan’s failure to fully capitalize on Sino-Pak free trade agreement demonstrates the need for a major policy effort to make the most of the corridor. For one, the Pakistani government needs to place greater emphasis on trade relations in its overall foreign policy as well as on fostering the exporting aspirations of small and midsize companies.
