A product of an 1894 treaty to separate the
Russian Empire from British India, the Wakhan Corridor is a thin panhandle in
North Afghanistan. The Emirs of Badakhshan once leveraged on the region’s
control over mountain passes on the Silk Road to China to build a wealthy
domain extending as far as Kashgar. Today the border to China is closed, the
tracks are desolate, and only sheep roam where rich caravans once plied. Yet,
if challenges can be overcome through bilateral cooperation, this ancient
trading route may provide old advantages and new opportunities for both China
and Afghanistan
Figure 1: Current Infrastructure
Development Projects
Figure 2: Dark Blue – Paved
all-weather roads; Pink – Unpaved dirt tracks for 4WD travel; Yellow –
Projected Wakhan Road; 1: Karakoram Highway (North to Kashgar, South to
Gilgit); 2: 1.5 hours from Baharak to Fayzabad and onwards to Kabul 3: Pamir
Highway (West to Dushanbe, East to Osh)
Opportunities
Reopening the Wakhan seems
increasingly viable in these exciting times for intra-regional trade; the
impending lift of Iranian sanctions; growing convergence between Russia, China
and Pakistan, together with India’s Connect Central Asia Policy precipitates a
shift in economic attention to the region. China’s One Belt One Read (OBOR)
development plan, convergent with President Ashraf Ghani’s transit country
proposal and Pakistan’s new found emphasis on Gwadar Port, could lead to the
integration of Afghanistan into a cohesive economic area bridging the maritime
and land routes of the Silk Road. In 1991, intra-Central Asia trade accounted
for 20 percent of all trade in the region; today, due to the disintegration of
joint production processes, that figure has shrunk to 3.5 percent.
Reinvigorating intra-regional trade with access to Chinese inputs would be an
efficient strategy to restore productive capacity for value-added manufacturing
in a region now characterised by primary exports.
Its proximity to the Karakoram
Highway (KKH) would see the Wakhan connected to the US$46 billion
China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a massive mesh of Chinese
infrastructure investment designed to transform the region into a strategic
energy nexus through pipelines, power grids and railways. This provides not
only a market for Afghan oil and energy products, but provides electricity
imports to a country where, according to the World Bank only 43 percent of the
population has reliable power grid access. Most importantly, Wakhan offers a
route bypassing Pakistan and reducing Afghan dependency on a neighbour it
barely trusts which accounts for a third of all trade, a much-needed boon
considering Afghanistan’s perennial trade deficit, currently valued at 37.4
percent of GDP.
For China, Afghanistan itself boasts
bountiful resources of rare minerals and oil, which the Chinese have
demonstrated a keen interest in by signing oil contracts in Faryab and
Sar-e-Pul and by purchasing the MesAynak mining lease for US$4.4 billion in
2009, which remains the single largest investment to Afghanistan to date.
Afghanistan’s central position allows China to link up with various
infrastructure projects in the region, including the
Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) natural gas pipeline, the
Central Asia-South Asia Electricity Transmission Project (CASA-1000) and the
Asian Development Bank’s Afghan Ring Road Initiative (see Figure 1).
Fostering regional economic interdependency increases the attractiveness of
China’s own Silk Road Economic Belt project, while prosperity will lead to
stability in Afghanistan and surrounding polities.
With 2.6 million tons of trade in
2014, China’s existing trade with Central Asia through the well-established
Alashankou port-of-entry with Kazakhstan is booming , while trade with South
Asia through the Karakoram Highway (KKH) is poised to take off. Compared to
these, the Wakhan offers China the opportunity to bridge South and Central
Asia, profiting from the streamlined production networks that lower the
barriers to trade and result in a coherent economic region, under Chinese
leadership.
On a grander platform, with all
roads leading to Beijing, China will gain a major boost in its endeavour in the
New Great Game for the Central Asian Republics. Energy, oil and trade nexuses
concentrated to the East will leave China’s greatest adversaries in the New
Great Game excluded and frustrated. Afghanistan is the final key for China to
completely encircle India, allowing Central Asia unimpeded trade southwards to
Pakistan’s Port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea. The completion of the OBOR
project with Afghanistan as a crucial linchpin would likely see the cost and
barriers of trade from Central Asia to China decrease relative to excluded,
peripheral countries like the USA and Japan, who are also conveniently China’s
rivals. In one bold stroke, China has the capability to take victory in the New
Great Game.
Challenges
Nonetheless, the current
infrastructure situation in the Wakhan makes all these opportunities moot. From
Fayzabad, the largest city in Badakhshan, primary earth roads vulnerable to
inclement weather run 160km as far as Ishkashim, while 190 kilometres of dirt
tracks provide access up to the village of Sarhad. From there, no roads exist
until the Chinese border 100 kilometres away, where the closest major city of
Tashkurgan connects to the Karakoram Highway (see Figure 2). A
loaded truck from Fayzabad would take 19 hours to travel just 160 kilmetres to
Ishkashim, and there would be no means to get it any further. As a result,
trade has remained non-existent since the border was closed in 1949.
In a bid to ease the military
logistics situation and encourage commerce, both American and Afghan
authorities have issued requests to open the border in 2009. Since then,
in response to an appeal by the Afghan ambassador in 2013, China has only
pledged a feasibility study. Yet, a preliminary proposal made at the Pak-Afghan
Joint Economic Commission meeting in November 2015 suggests that countries
in the region may be moving to resolve outstanding challenges.
Despite key cultural differences,
China has remained consistent in its stand of keeping the border closed in
order to limit influences from Afghanistan on domestic Uyghur
religious-nationalistic terrorism and other socio-political implications. Once
considered insurgent-free, Badakhshan Province has seen increasing spates of
Taliban and ISIS activity.Notwithstanding the Badakhshan Massacre in 2010,
August 2015 saw the Islamic State conduct a suicide attack and July 2015 saw
the Taliban overrun a joint military base. In September 2015, the Taliban
captured swathes of Raghestan district. These incidents continue to threaten
the security of any passage through the Wakhan Corridor. Nonetheless, as the province
and the Wakhan in particular are still among the safest regions in the entire
country, the chief security threat will likely be opium smuggling. Badakhshan
experienced a 77 percent increase in opium cultivation from 2013-2014, making
it a major opium nexus on the Golden Crescent, and Tashkurgan’s rich water
resources coupled with China’s may make it a convenient heroin production area.
Enforcing anti-smuggling measures in the remote region may prove to be an
exercise in fruition, and China’s 20% rise in drug abuse rates from 2013 to
2014 means 0.3 percent of the population are now registered drug offenders, no
doubt already a headache for Beijing.
Considering China’s infrastructure
building track record, constructing the road will not be an unsurmountable
challenge. However, low human development will remain an endemic problem to
providing the logistics support required to sustain the route. Civilisation in
the Wakhan consists of 10,000 people living in tiny Wakhi villages or among
Kyrgyz shepherding tribes, hence running water, electricity and even food
supplies will need to be built from scratch. Landslides, avalanches and
rockfalls threaten to obstruct the pass, while the 2015 Hindu Kush earthquake
with its epicentre near the Wakhanis a reminder of the risks associated with
mountainous infrastructure construction.
Overcoming Challenges
To overcome these challenges,
partnership must extend beyond inter-governmental cooperation. Well-established
and experienced organisations like the Aga Khan Foundation should be
courted to spearhead and buttress Chinese and Afghan efforts to secure the
region. In-depth anthropological understanding of regional demographics can
also go a long way towards harmonising the region and pulling it out of its
isolation. Building a socially stable region will be a long, complex process,
requiring the education of the population bereft of education and the provision
of public and private investment to build access to services and food security.
Funding for such infrastructure could come from the nascent Asia Infrastructure
Investment Bank (AIIB), from the ADB, or even from the China Export-Import Bank
with its stunning track record in African infrastructure investment.
Recent developments suggest that
China is committing to improving security on the border: a newly built road
leads up to 10kilometres from the border on the Chinese side (shown in pink
in Figure 2), a supply depot operational since 2009 provides logistics
support to border guards, and a mobile communications center provides optical
cables for internet connection to the remote region. Tashkurgan’s company-sized
county garrison provides first-level security. However, it would be naïve
to expect the overstretched Afghan military to provide anything like Pakistan’s
12,000 man Special Security Division for the Karakoram Highway. Instead, a
softer approach seems to be the key. China has excellent relations with the
Taliban, having hosted direct Afghan-Taliban talks in July 2015, with a second
round expected in December 2015. In January 2015, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah
Mujahid even made a visit to China to ‘enhance ties and making (sic)
relationships’ between the two countries. This alongside a general ambivalent
mood towards Chinese people among Afghans may go a long way towards defusing
security tensions.
As part of the Xinjiang Work
Conference, the city of Tashkurgan has been paired with Shenzhen, granting it
0.5% of the annual budget of the thriving metropolis of 10.6 million people,
alongside human resource and technological assistance. This money has gone to
the creation of a 100 million RMB Border Trade Zone intended to boost trade and
tourism, with plans to boost the transport infrastructure through rail
connections, upgraded highways and even an airport. Private investment
reached US$15 million in 2009, including a mineral water plant by Spring
Capital Hong Kong. While these investments are designed primarily to support
the KKH on the Khunjerab Pass to Pakistan, Tashkurgan’s development as a
regional trading hub would provide China with the infrastructural capital
required to push towards the Wakhan.
Sceptics would be wise to remember
that developing the Wakhan Corridor, while ambitious, is the resurrection ofan
ancient, tried and proven trade route. A successful project in the Wakhan will
be far more than an economic measure; it will simultaneously be a domestic and
foreign confidence-building mechanism, a geostrategic manoeuvre to outflank
both America and India, and a stabilising force in the region. China has done
nothing for the Wakhan thus far, but it is for these reasons that China is
right to exercise patience and caution to ensure the project fulfils its
maximum potential.
*Boh Ze Kai is a project intern with Mantraya
and is a lead researcher in Mantraya’s Borderlands project.
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