Ever heard of the city of Gwadar, in a region of Pakistan called Balochistan? I haven't. For reference, Balochistan is (1) on the map to the right; the Swat Valley, where much of the recent news has been, is at roughly (2). (GNU license for map from wikipedia here)
It might be that we're going to be hearing a lot more about Gwadar and Balochistan in the future. For those of us who are inclined (either because of a cynical disposition or an appreciation of history, if those are different things) to see the U.S. fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban as primarily a pretext for moves by the US in a Great Game with China, the following is an interesting development.
In the May 9th issue of The Tribune of India, Afzal Khan writes from Islamabad:
In a surprisingly candid public comment, China has voiced concern over the "too high" US military presence in the region.
"China is concerned over the increasing US influence in the region," Chinese Ambassador Lou Zhaohui said here, adding that the number of foreign forces was "too high" in the region. It is for the first time that China has publicly stated a position on American military presence in the area ever since it attacked Afghanistan after the 9/11 in 2001.
Talking to reporters during a visit to the Islamabad Chambers of Commerce and Industry, the Chinese envoy said the "outside influence" was growing in the region. China has suspicions over US intentions in Gwadar port built by Chinese assistance. The port can act as a gateway for China to reach out to West Asia.
"These are issues of serious concern for China," he said.
Gwandar is in Balochistan, a region of Pakistan with an insurgent nationalist (not Taliban) movement. Balochistan is both the largest and least populated province of Pakistan. From the wiki entry:
Gwadar . . . is located on the southwestern coast of Pakistan, on the Arabian Sea. It is strategically located between three increasingly important regions: the oil-rich Middle East, heavily populated Pakistan and the economically emerging and resource-laden region of Central Asia. The Gwadar Port was built on a turnkey basis by China and signifies an enlarging Chinese footprint in a critically important area. Opened in spring 2007 by then Pakistani military ruler General Pervez Musharraf, in the presence of Chinese Communications Minister Li Shenglin, Gwadar Port is now being expanded into a naval base with Chinese technical and financial assistance. Gwadar Port became operational in 2008, with the first ship to dock bringing 52000 tonnes of wheat from Canada. Minister of Ports and Shipping Sardar Nabil Ahmed Khan Gabol officially inaugurated the port on 21 December 2008. China has acknowledged that Gwadar’s strategic value is no less than that of the Karakoram Highway, which helped cement the China-Pakistan nexus. In addition to Gwadar serving as a potential Chinese naval anchor, Beijing is also interested in turning it into an energy-transport hub by building an oil pipeline from Gwadar into Chinese-ruled Xinjiang. The planned pipeline will carry crude oil sourced from Arab and African states. Such transport by pipeline will cut freight costs and also help insulate the Chinese imports from interdiction by hostile naval forces in case of any major war.
(Map from wikipedia and freed by the creator to public domain.)
And here is Pepe Escobar writing in the May 9th Asia Times about the dynamics of U.S. geopolitical and military involvement:
Washington's dream scenario is Gwadar as the new Dubai - while China would need Gwadar as a port and also as a base for pumping gas via a long pipeline to China. One way or another, it will all depend on local grievances being taken very seriously. Islamabad pays a pittance in royalties for the Balochis, and development aid is negligible; Balochistan is treated as a backwater. Gwadar as the new Dubai would not necessarily mean local Balochis benefiting from the boom; in many cases they could even be stripped of their local land.
To top it all, there's the New Great Game in Eurasia fact that Pakistan is a key pivot to both NATO and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), of which Pakistan is an observer. So whoever "wins" Balochistan incorporates Pakistan as a key transit corridor to either Iranian gas from the monster South Pars field or a great deal of the Caspian wealth of "gas republic" Turkmenistan.
(snip)
Now imagine thousands of mobile US troops - backed by supreme air power and hardcore artillery - pouring into this desert across the immense, 800-kilometer-long, empty southern Afghanistan-Balochistan border. These are Obama's surge troops who will be in theory destroying opium crops in Helmand province in Afghanistan. They will also try to establish a meaningful presence in the ultra-remote, southwest Afghanistan, Baloch-majority province of Nimruz. It would take nothing for them to hit Pakistani Balochistan in hot pursuit of Taliban bands. And this would certainly be a prelude for a de facto US invasion of Balochistan.
Escobar writes that control of prospective oil pipelines is the key to understanding the situation. I am not so sure.
Here are snippets from an April 2008 study cited by Escobar (but, in my opinion, interpreted innaccurately by him), by Robert G. Wirsing for the Strategic Studies Institute, a U.S. Army think tank, titled "Baloch Nationalism and the Geopolitics of Energy Resources: The Changing Context of Separatism in Pakistan" (warning PDF) (no fair use limit: "This report is cleared for public release; distribution is unlimited.").
This is very interesting stuff:
[This] monograph looks at how Pakistan’s mounting energy insecurity — a product of rapid increase in demand coupled with rising scarcity and the region’s intensified energy rivalry— has magnified the economic and strategic importance of Balochistan, while at the same time complicating
Pakistan’s efforts to cope with the province’s resurgent tribal separatism. This change in the energy context exerts a powerful threefold impact on the insurgents’ prospects. In the first place, it lifts Balochistan and Baloch nationalism to a position much higher on the scale of central government priorities, thus seeming to warrant, as the government sees the problem, zero tolerance and ruthless crushing of the insurgency. Second, it arms the Baloch insurgents both with greater incentives than ever for reclaiming control of Balochistan and with the novel capacity to drive the economic and political costs to the government of continuing insurgent activity far higher than ever in the past.
In Afghanistan’s Shadow, a book published in 1981 by well-known author Selig S. Harrison, examined that era’s threat of Soviet expansionism in the light of Baloch nationalism. It was in Balochistan, the vast and sparsely populated province in southwestern Pakistan, that the Pakistan army had ruthlessly suppressed a tribal separatist insurgency in the course of the 1970s. Rebellious Balochistan lay between Afghanistan and the sea. Since Soviet forces had militarily occupied Afghanistan in late 1979, the possibility had naturally arisen that Soviet leaders might be tempted to realize the long-cherished Russian goal of securing a warmwater port by exploiting lingering separatist grievances in neighboring Pakistan. "A glance at the map," Harrison wrote at the outset of his book, "quickly explains why strategically located Balochistan and the five million Baloch tribesmen who live there could easily become the focal point of superpower conflict."
Over a quarter-century has passed since Harrison made that observation. Baloch nationalism is again on the rise, and Balochistan is again the scene of violent encounters between Baloch militants and Pakistani security forces.
(snip)
One of the most remarkable changes pertinent to today’s conflict, and the particular focus of this monograph, has taken place in its energy context. Put simply, assured access to hydrocarbon or other energy resources, including both oil and natural gas, has in recent decades assumed a far greater importance than hitherto as a driver of Pakistan’s security policy, both domestic and external. This is to say that energy security in Pakistan, as in most other countries in its neighborhood, now stands at or near the top of national priorities.
(snip)
A third way in which energy resources have a direct and important relationship to Baloch nationalism is that Balochistan is the site of a major port facility and energy hub currently under development at Gwadar on the province’s coast (see Map 1). Gwadar is the terminus of a projected interstate transport corridor that is to link Pakistan by road, rail, air, and, to some extent, pipeline with both China’s Xinjiang province and, via Afghanistan, with the energy-rich Central Asian Republics (CARs). Baloch nationalists have complained that the government is developing the port and corridor without consultation with, involvement of, or benefit to the Baloch. The anger of Baloch nationalists has sometimes been directed against China, whose investment in the Gwadar project and in other Balochistan-based ventures has been substantial.
Wirsing discusses two pipeline projects that have been under consideration for Pakistan: the IPI (Iran Pakistan India) line with the U.S. does not like, and the TAPI (Turkmenistan Afghanistan Pakistan India) line which the U.S. does like. This is what Escobar writing the Asia Times is on about. However, Wirsing stresses that neither project is realistic at the moment, given the strife in the region and the resultant difficulty in keeping planned pipelines running. The alternatives are highway-shipping-rail routes. Gwandar figures prominently here.
In place of the ill-starred eastward-running natural gas pipelines, the region is witnessing instead the fastpaced development of competitive and politically divisive "transport corridors" built on a north-south axis. These corridors consist mainly of port, road, rail, and air infrastructural networks. The primary function of these networks is, along with promotion of commercial and political ties, to improve Indian or, as the case may be, Pakistani access to the energyrich CARs and to achieve some influence over the production, processing, and distribution of energy resources. The inauguration on March 20, 2007, of Pakistan’s Chinese-assisted Gwadar deep sea port on the Balochistan coast gave clear sign of Islamabad’s intention for Pakistan to become the CARs’ favored commercial and energy intermediary. The expected completion by the end of 2008 of the Indian-constructed Zaranj-Delaram highway in southwestern Afghanistan will give an equally transparent sign of New Delhi’s similar intent.
(snip)
Undoubtedly, it was "the convergence of Sino- Pakistani strategic interests [that] put the port onto a fast track to its early completion";31 and it is the Chinese connection with Gwadar, of course, that has attracted most attention from regional security observers. As the principal contributor (of about $200 million) to the project’s first phase, China has transparent interests both in monitoring the supply routes for its rapidly increasing energy shipments from the Persian Gulf and also in opening an alternative route via Pakistan for import/export trade serving China’s vast, sometimes restive, and rapidly developing Muslim-majority Xinjiang Autonomous Region.
From New Delhi’s point of view, the strategic implications of the Gwadar project are substantial— and clearly worrisome. First, Gwadar complicates the Indian navy’s strategic planning. It is one of several naval bases mentioned by Musharraf in his inaugural comments, two of them on the Balochistan coast, which Pakistan is building to diversify and deepen its naval defenses. It is one of several signs that Pakistan aspires to a significantly greater and better-defended naval presence in the Indian Ocean.
Second, the construction of Gwadar and its associated road, rail, and pipeline networks has been
openly justified as a means to materially strengthen Pakistan’s influence with Afghanistan and the Central Asian states, with whom it is already formally associated in the Economic Cooperation Organization founded by Turkey, Pakistan, and Iran in 1985 and expanded to its present membership of 10 (entirely Muslim states) in 1992.
Third, New Delhi will inevitably view Gwadar as another link in the China-built chain encircling India on its eastern, northern, and western borders. More perhaps than any other development in the history of Sino-Pakistan relations, Gwadar establishes the major infrastructural framework for substantially strengthened military and economic ties between Pakistan and China. Potentially, these ties could lead to Pakistan’s near absorption into a China-centric strategic partnership.
So what we seem to have here is a group of Balochistan nationalists, a coming surge of U.S. troops, and a Chinese-funded deep water port. Apparently Musharraf was brutal in putting down the Balochistan nationalist insurgents to further the construction of Gwadar, which Wirsing describes as "An obscure fishing village with a population of about 5,000 when the project was begun in earnest in 2001, Gwadar has already grown into a bustling town of at least 125,000—with prospects, if the current boom in real estate investment is any sign, of far greater expansion."
I am not sure how to read all of this. I am only sure that I have seen nothing about this in the U.S. media and it seems to be critical to understanding the Pakistan and U.S. governement's motivations.
(h/t bumblebums for the Escobar article.)