Will Balochistan Blow Up China’s Belt and Road?

Violence in the Pakistani province is on the rise—and now Chinese are the target.
BY MUHAMMAD AKBAR NOTEZAI
Pakistani naval personnel stand guard near a ship at the Gwadar port on Nov. 13, 2016. 

Freedom fighters: The Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) released a video warning China to stop aiding Pakistan to brutally suppress Baloch people.

In 2015, when Chinese dictator Xi Jinping’s plane entered Pakistani airspace, eight Pakistan Air Force jets scrambled to escort it. 

The country’s leadership warmly welcomed the Chinese leader—and his money. 

On his two-day state visit, he announced a multibillion-dollar project called the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which would form part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and would revolve around the development of a huge port in the city of Gwadar.
Gwadar, a formerly isolated city in Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan province, boomed. 

As soon as the CPEC was announced, tourists, including journalists, started visiting Gwadar. 

The Pearl Continental, the only five-star hotel in the area, had been on the brink of closure. 

Now guests thronged. 

But not everyone was happy about that. 

Baloch nationalists and underground organizations opposed the CPEC from the beginning, on the grounds that it would turn the Baloch people into a minority in their own province. 

They threatened attacks on any CPEC project anywhere in Balochistan.
There was plenty of reason to believe their threats. 

During the tenure of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who led Pakistan from 1999 to 2008, Baloch insurgents killed Chinese engineers and workers in the province. 

One of the incidents took place in Gwadar, where in May 2004, militants killed three Chinese engineers. 

The engineers had been driving to work. 

When they slowed down to pass over a speed bump, a terrorist in a nearby car detonated the barrier with a remote control.
In recent years, violence had waned. 

There were no new projects, and the city seemed to have settled into its own rhythm. 

But following the CPEC announcement, according to the News International, a Pakistani English daily, Pakistan deployed a total of 17,177 security personnel from the Army and other security forces to ensure the security of Chinese nationals. 

In the years since, Gwadar has become something of a military cantonment. 

Army, police, and other law enforcers mill about.
And locals traveling around Gwadar face routine harassment at security checkpoints.
The policing has done little to deter attacks. 

In recent months, two reported incidents have put the province on edge. 

The first attack occurred on April 18, when 15 to 20 Baloch insurgents dressed in military uniforms forms forced 14 passengers off a public bus and shot them, one by one. 

Most of victims were from the Pakistan Navy and Coast Guards, whom Baloch insurgents view as an occupying force.
Then, on May 11, the Pearl Continental in the heart of Gwadar came under fire. 

Situated on a promontory overlooking the port and the Arabian Sea, the hotel is mammoth and a favorite of foreign dignitaries. 

Security there is intense, and since it is near Gwadar’s port area there are already plenty of military personnel in the area. 

Three armed attackers from the Balochistan Liberation Army’s Majeed Brigade nevertheless managed to breach the defenses and open fire on people inside. 

According to officials, five individuals—four hotel employees, including three security guards, and a navy officer—lost their lives.
The Pearl Continental attack in particular bodes ill for Chinese investment in Balochistan.
Before this month, it was hard to imagine that Baloch insurgents would be capable of carrying out the attack in the center of Gwadar, even with the local support. 

But now any sense of security has been undermined.
Established in 2011, the Majeed Brigade, a suicide attack squad within the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), is reportedly named after Abdul Majeed Baloch, who attempted to assassinate then-Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1974 in Balochistan. 

In 1973, Bhutto had ordered a military operation against the Baloch because Baloch insurgents had vowed war against the state of Pakistan after Islamabad had dismissed the democratically elected National Awami Party government in Balochistan in February 1973. 

The operation triggered a major insurgency in Balochistan that lasted until 1977. 

Majeed was killed by security forces before he could carry out his plan against Bhutto.
In the first several years after the BLA was formed in 2000, it mostly waged attacks on national security forces, state infrastructure, and Punjabi settlers. 

In more recent years, under Aslam Baloch, who died in Kandahar in December 2018, the Majeed Brigade has focused on Chinese nationals and Chinese-funded projects. 

Such attacks seemed more likely to provoke media attention. 

He tapped his oldest son, Rehan Baloch, for a suicide attack on Chinese engineers in Dalbandin, a city in Balochistan, last August. 

The attack resulted in minor injuries for the engineers. 

He also oversaw an attack on the Chinese consulate in Karachi a few months later. 

Two police officials and two visa applicants were killed.
As these incidents suggest, the Majeed Brigade is gaining momentum. 

And it is joined by new groups, such as the Baloch Raaji Aajoi Sangar, an alliance of Baloch separatist groups specifically focused on attacking CPEC projects. 

From the beginning, the Baloch have been pushed to the wall. 

They have never been treated as equal citizens of Pakistan, nor have they been given equal constitutional, economic, and political opportunities. 

This is why some Baloch protest peacefully, some do nothing, and some have taken up arms against the state.

Pakistan Can’t Afford China’s ‘Friendship’

Pakistan's elites think Chinese cash can save the country. They're wrong.
BY C. CHRISTINE FAIR

In recent months, the Chinese-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has left Pakistanis emboldened, Indians angry, and U.S. analysts worried. 

Ostensibly, CPEC will connect Pakistan to China’s western Xinjiang province through the development of vast new transportation and energy infrastructure. 

The project is part of China’s much-hyped Belt and Road Initiative, a grand, increasingly vague geopolitical plan bridging Eurasia that Xi Jinping has promoted heavily.
Pakistani and Chinese officials boast that CPEC will help address Pakistan’s electricity generation problem, bolster its road and rail networks, and shore up the economy through the construction of special economic zones. 

But these benefits are highly unlikely to materialize. 

The project is more inclined to leave Pakistan burdened with unserviceable debt while further exposing the fissures in its internal security.

Pakistan and China often speak of their “all-weather friendship,” but the truth is that the relationship has always been a cynical one. 

China cultivated Pakistan as a client through the provision of military assistance; diplomatic and political cover in the U.N. Security Council; and generous loan aid in an effort to counter both American influence and the system of anti-Communist Western treaty alliances. 

China also sought to embolden Pakistan to harangue India, but not to the point of war because that would expose the hard limits of Chinese support. 

Despite Pakistan’s boasts of iron-clad Chinese support, when Pakistan went to war with India in 1965, 1971, and 1999, China did little or nothing to bail out its client in distress.
During the 1971 war, when India intervened in Pakistan’s civil war in its Bengali-dominated eastern wing, President Richard Nixon requested China move troops along its eastern border with India to intimidate India and stave off Pakistan’s defeat. 

However, China declined to undertake even this modest effort to preclude India from vivisecting Pakistan. 

East Pakistan became independent Bangladesh in 1971. 

In a nod to Pakistan, China refused to recognize Bangladesh until August 1975, even after Pakistan did so in February 1974.
There’s little reason to think China has made a sudden conversion to altruism when it comes to CPEC. 

The project originated in 2013, when the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, and Pakistan’s then-president, Asif Ali Zardari, agreed to build an economic corridor between the two countries. 

The project inched closer to fruition in 2014, when Pakistan’s President Mamnoon Hussain and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif traveled to China on different occasions to further discussions. 

In November 2014, the Chinese government announced that it would finance $46 billion in energy and infrastructure projects in Pakistan as part of CPEC. 

In September 2016, China announced a new loan deal for CPEC valued at $51.6 billion. 

In November 2016, part of CPEC became “operational” when products were moved by truck from China and loaded onto ships at Pakistan’s port Gwador along the Makran coast for markets in West Asia and Africa. 

After this major development, China declared that it would increase its investment again to $62 billion in April.
Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership alike have told the public that CPEC will solve Pakistan’s chronic electricity shortages, improve an aging road and rail infrastructure, provide a fillip to Pakistan’s economy, knit an increasingly pariah state to a new Chinese-led geopolitical order, and diminish the role of the much-reviled United States in the region. 

CPEC has the bonus of irritating the Indians because it strengthens Pakistan’s hold on territory in Jammu and Kashmir that it snatched in the 1947-48 war as well as portions of that territory that Pakistan subsequently ceded to China in 1963 as a part of the Sino-Pakistan boundary agreement. 

India claims these lands, currently held by Pakistan and China, and deems their occupation illegal.
Despite the bold claims made by China and Pakistan, there are many reasons to be dubious about the purported promises of CPEC. 

There’s already violence all along the corridor. 

The north-most part of CPEC is the Karakoram Highway (KKH), which gashes through the Karakoram Mountain Range to connect Kashgar in Xinjiang with Pakistan’s troubled province of Gilgit-Baltistan. 

Xinjiang is in the throes of a slow-burning insurgency by the Muslim Uighur minority against the Communist state. 

Gilgit-Baltistan, a Shiite-majority polity under the thumb of a Sunni-dominated Pakistan, is part of the above-noted contested territory of Jammu-Kashmir. 

Here, geology and weather further limit CPEC. 

The Karakoram Highway, a narrow road weaving through perilous mountains, can’t bear heavy traffic. 

Expanding the KKH will not be easy. 

Residents of Gilgit-Baltistan worry about the environmental costs in relation to the few benefits they will enjoy. 

There have been episodic protests, which the Pakistani government has ruthlessly put down. Meanwhile, Gwador is experiencing a prolonged drought, frustrating the project while the four extant desalination plants remain idle.
In the south, CPEC is anchored to the port at Gwador in Pakistan’s insurgency-riven Balochistan province. 

The local Baloch people deeply resent the plan because it will fundamentally change the demography of the area. 

Before the expansion of Gwadar, the population of the area was 70,000. 

If the project comes to full fruition the population would be closer to 2 million — most of whom would be non-Baloch. 

Many poor Baloch have already been displaced from the area. 

Since construction has begun, there have been numerous attacks against Chinese personnel, among other workers.
There’s also the stubborn problem of economic competitiveness. 

For CPEC to be more competitive than the North-South Corridor that is rooted to the Iranian port of Chabahar, Gwador needs to offer a safer and shorter route from the Arabian Sea to Central Asia. 

For that to happen, Gwador needs to be connected by road to the Afghan Ring Road in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province, which is under sustained attacks by the Afghan Taliban. 

Alternatively, a new route could connect Gwador with the border crossing at Torkham (near Peshawar) by traveling up Balochistan, with its own active ethnic insurgency, through or adjacent to Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, which is the epicenter of Islamist terrorism and insurgency throughout Pakistan. 

It takes great faith — or idiocy, or greed, or all of the above — to believe that this is possible.
All of these issues raise salient questions about the real utility of this unfolding fiasco. 

If CPEC is not an economically viable route for actual commerce, what purpose does it serve? Analyst Andrew Small, among others, has argued that CPEC is, in reality, a redundant supply route for China should it face an embargo during a military conflict. 

It’s also possible that if the port at Gwador is not economically sustainable the real goal is the creation of a Chinese naval outpost. 

Many in India, Pakistan’s historic rival, have also come to this conclusion. 

They may well be correct, according to recent Chinese reports indicating that China may “expand its marine corps and may station new marine brigades in Gwadar.”
While the benefits to transit may be illusory, it is possible that Pakistan could benefit from purportedly low-hanging fruit, including the much-lauded economic zones and power plants. 

Pakistan does struggle with power shortages. 

But its problem is not a lack of supply, rather the complex issue of “circular debt” referring to the accumulating unpaid bills of the power sector; the theft of power through illegal connections, meter tampering, and other means; and an inadequate transmission system. 

Meanwhile, Pakistanis have learned that the current Chinese development model will do little for their economy. 

China prefers to use its own companies and employees rather than hire locally.
Pakistani citizens also have no way to know what CPEC will cost them. Neither government has been clear about what projects are part of the plan. 

Costing has been completely opaque. 

China sets the price, contracts the work out to Chinese companies, and saddles Pakistan with the loans. 

Given the ongoing security threats on Chinese nationals in Pakistan, Islamabad is raising a CPEC Protection Force, the costs of which will be passed on to Pakistani citizens. 

The State Bank of Pakistan has repeatedly called for more transparency, to no avail. 

Astonishingly, according to the Pakistani daily The Dawn, “Despite the frantic activity, Islamabad had yet to determine the expected cost and benefit, expressed in monetary terms, of the mega project.” 

And that’s before factoring in other costs such as the cultural and religious tensions between Chinese and Pakistanis, although there’s been a public relations push by both governments to downplay them.
Recently, The Dawn claimed to have accessed the alleged CPEC “master plan,” drawn up by the China Development Bank and the National Development Reform Commission of the People’s Republic of China. 

It suggests that CPEC is really about agriculture, an issue that had not previously been discussed in the extensive media coverage of the plan. 

As part of the overall project, thousands of acres of productive agricultural land will be leased to the Chinese for “demonstration projects” for newly developed seed varieties and irrigation technology. 

Chinese companies will be the primary beneficiaries of these initiatives.

Pakistanis should be worried about the way CPEC is shaping up. 

If it is even partially executed, Pakistan would be indebted to China as never before. 

And unlike Pakistan’s other traditional allies, such as the United States, China will probably use its leverage to obtain greater compliance from its problematic client. 

China is particularly concerned about the Islamist militant groups active among China’s Uighur Muslim population in Xinjiang. 

Uigher militant groups have long shared ties with groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, some of which have been patronized by the Pakistani state, such as the Afghan Taliban. 

China has used religious and political oppression, along with crude violence, to eviscerate the Islamist revival among Xinjiang’s Uighers and has counted on Pakistan to give China political cover while doing so. 

In taking on Chinese debt, Pakistan may also risk severely worsening its already critical relations with India, which has been watching the CPEC drama unfold with growing alarm. 

In the north, CPEC continues to make permanent the Pakistani and Chinese grip on territory India claims. 

In the south, Chinese naval vessels may dock in the deep port of Gwador, threatening New Delhi in the Arabian Sea. 

In normal times, this would be a serious concern for the United States — but Washington is so distracted by the chaos of the Trump administration that the issue has gone largely under the radar.
But the news may not be all bad. 

For China to get maximal returns on its extensive investments in Pakistan as well as Afghanistan it needs stability in both countries. 

In recent years, China has stepped up its role in trying to negotiate peace in Afghanistan by helping to mediate between Pakistan and Afghanistan. 

As Pakistan’s economy becomes evermore interwoven with China’s, China may be in a position to dampen Pakistan’s worrying affinity for terrorist groups and nuclear proliferation — particularly the latter, because China enabled Pakistan’s nuclear program to begin with. 

If China took on the responsibility of managing Pakistan, Washington might be happy to wash its hands of the problem and let the civilians in Islamabad and the uniformed men in Rawalpindi stab someone else in the back for a change.