Expanding the high road

Beijing is pouring money and labour into improving the highway linking the Chinese Xinjiang region to Pakistan's Northern Areas and to the sea – even as events in the former have proved disquieting.

In late June, somewhere between Gilgit and the Hunza Valley, a Chinese worker gestured a code to signal clearance after blowing a final whistle to keep onlookers as far as possible from a huge stone in middle of a road. Seconds later, a massive explosion sent a thick column of smoke and dust into the sky, soon joined by a second rumble as the echo rebounded off a mountain across the low-lying Indus River. As the dust began to settle, two loaders and an excavator were quickly put into high gear, to begin removing the debris. Before restarting their work, a few of the Chinese workers moved away from the blast site and took cigarettes out of their pockets, to sit on roadside rocks. Eventually, they turned their attention back to the job at hand: improving the Karakoram Highway, the only land link between China and Pakistan.

The highway is arguably the highest paved road in the world, connecting the two neighbours across the Karakoram mountain range through the Khunjerab Pass, at an altitude of 15,397 feet. Due to its elevation and the difficult conditions under which it was built, historians have referred to the Karakoram Highway as the 'ninth wonder of the world'. Construction of the 1300-km-long road began in 1966, jointly undertaken by Pakistan and China; the work finally came to an end in 1986, after two decades of hard labour and the loss of 810 Pakistani and 82 Chinese workers to landslides and falls. The highway's route traces one of the many paths of the ancient Silk Route.

Today, that work continues. According to Pakistani officials, more than 2500 Chinese engineers and labourers, armed with heavy road-construction machinery and supported by local employees, are working at top speed in an attempt to complete the project ahead of the scheduled target of 2011. The ultimate aim is to minimise the travel distance between Balochistan's Gwadar port (also built with Chinese assistance) and the troubled Chinese province of Xinjiang. Manzoor Elahi, a Peshawar-based businessman, says that with the widening and improvements to the highway, Chinese exporters in Xinjiang are hoping that their goods can be efficiently delivered to clients in the Gulf, West Asia and Europe, through Gwadar. From western China, after all, Shanghai and other eastern ports are some 3000 km away, while Gwadar is just half that. In this way, the improvements taking place to the highway – as well as to China's east-west railway artery, which is being extended from Kashgar (in Xinjiang) to Peshawar – should merely be seen as a northward extension of the port.

Balawaristan
Both the Northern Areas of Pakistan and Western region of China offer Islamabad and Beijing unique opportunities to strengthen economic bonds. Pakistan itself also imports a wide variety of good from China via the Karakoram Highway. The country's Northern Areas also have significant natural resources, containing precious minerals such as gold, ruby, emerald, iron ore and uranium. Water is another significant resource: Pakistan's primary watercourse is the Indus River, which flows through this area.

The economic rationale for this massive infrastructure upgrade clearly makes sense both to Beijing and to Islamabad. However, political uncertainty and militancy threats in both the Northern Areas and Xinjiang have recently been upstaging these seemingly bright prospects. The 5 July outbreak of violence in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, has clearly shaken Beijing. The escalation of tensions, leading to almost 200 deaths, has put a significant question mark over the future of the region and Chinese dreams about the prospects of the link to the Arabian Sea.

In fact, China's worries go well beyond Xinjiang. Officials in Beijing have been casting wary eyes at the growing political instability in the Northern Areas – as at Afghanistan and the Pakistani frontier in general. They are anxious about two potential spill-overs: of militancy in general and, given the inevitable response, of the old Great Game. Azmat Hayat Khan, a specialist on Chinese affairs and the vice-chancellor of the University of Peshawar, has referred to Xinjiang as China's "weakest point", and has described the US presence in Afghanistan as a "containment policy for China". Meanwhile, the Great Game rhetoric has recently been echoed by both NWFP Governor Owais Ahmed Ghani and Mir Ghazanfar Ali Khan, the Northern Areas' first democratically elected chief executive. It can be certain that mandarins in Beijing have been mulling things over similarly.

Many such concerns cannot be dismissed. Today, the Northern Areas face two central issues: a still-uncertain constitutional status, and the threat of a 'leaking' of militancy from immediately neighbouring areas. The Northern Areas, home to some 1.2 million Shia, Sunnis and Ismailis, is today echoing with nationalistic slogans, being voiced by organisations such as the Gilgit-Baltistan Democratic Alliance (GBDA), the Gilgit-Baltistan United Movement (GBUM) and the Balawaristan National Front (BNF), who are suggesting vehemently that Chitral and Kohistan are inseparable parts of Gilgit-Baltistan. This larger area was traditionally known as Balawaristan, a name that has been revived in recent years in calls for greater autonomy – and a voice in the Pakistan Parliament.

Officially, the Northern Areas is referred to by the government of Pakistan as the Federally Administered Northern Areas (FANA), and is the northernmost political entity within Azad Kashmir. The area became a single administrative unit only in 1970, at which point it was formed by merging Baltistan District, Gilgit Agency and the states of Nagar and Hunza. Prior to the creation of Pakistan, the Northern Areas were part of the princely state of Jammu & Kashmir, and a key component of India's strategic northern frontier. In 1947, the region successfully rebelled against the Maharaja of Kashmir, and supported full integration into Pakistan. "Almost 60 years later," a fact-finding report by the International Crisis Group stated in 2007,

Pakistan's military, the arbiter of its Kashmir policy, insists that the Northern Areas remain part of the disputed state of Jammu & Kashmir, and that any delineation of the region's constitutional status will have to wait for a solution of the Kashmir dispute. As a result, the Northern Areas are not included in the Pakistan Constitution and, unlike the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), are not represented in the Parliament. The region has been left in a constitutional limbo.

Mir Ghazanfar Ali says the issue is a major source of discontent among the people of the Northern Areas, and is fuelling nationalist sentiments.

Yet the nationalist fight is certainly not the only looming violence in the area, with police officials constantly worried about a seeping of militancy from Afghanistan, NWFP and Kashmir. Given the situation, the authorities have imposed strict security measures throughout the Northern Areas, particularly in the border regions and along the Karakoram Highway. The goal has been twofold: to prevent a spill-over of militants fleeing the recent military operation in Swat District, and to protect the Chinese workers involved with the highway-improvement project. This latter is no small concern, for while the Taliban and related militants often try to gain energy from anti-American sentiment in Pakistan, they have often targeted other foreigners for attack, particularly Chinese nationals. In October 2004, former Guantanamo Bay inmate Abdullah Mehsud kidnapped two Chinese engineers working on the Gomal Zam hydropower project, near South Waziristan, and other Chinese have been attacked in Peshawar, Gwadar and Turbat, in Balochistan.

As such, a special 400-strong police force has been set up to exclusively protect the Chinese engineers and labourers working on the Karakoram Highway project. Traffic going into the Hunza Valley or towns close to the Chinese border is also under strict observation by the police, with Pashto-speaking travellers reporting being more harshly questioned than others. Some analysts, including Azmat Hayat, say that the recent takeover of the Swat Valley by the Taliban was part of a "deliberate plan to block the Karakoram Highway", and thus to increasingly cut the area off.

If the importance that both Islamabad and Beijing currently seem to be putting on the Karakoram Highway expansion project is any indicator, that attempt will not be successful, at least in the long run. And with the 2011 end-date looming ever closer, these two 'remote' regions will be right at the centre of what could prove to be a booming new economy. At the moment, of course, the hope from all sides is that the suddenly escalated tension on the Chinese side and the continuing rumbles in the Pakistani side will not derail the economic expectations laid on the improved highway and rail link.