The Emperor’s New Road: China and the Project of the Century
Page 15
Through trial and error, the Harvard advisers helped produce Pakistan’s first five-year plan in 1955. Like U.S. military “trainers” who end up fighting alongside foreign forces, the advisers were also participants during this first process. There was simply too much to do and too few qualified Pakistani staff. “There are few very competent experienced older people, in or out of the government, and those that do exist cannot, in many cases, be separated from their present positions to work with the Planning Board,” Edward Mason, who directed the Harvard Advisory Group from 1954 to 1962, lamented.25 With pressure to produce the document, the advisers wrote large parts of the plan and had little time to train their Pakistani counterparts.26
The plan was completed late, two years into the period it covered, and its recommendations were politically unfeasible. The Pakistani government was preoccupied with debates about regional autonomy, the electoral system, and foreign policy. Among other things, the plan recommended large-scale land reforms, which would have challenged the country’s wealthiest families. Running hundreds of pages, the document was technical, and little effort was made to communicate its contents to the 80 percent of Pakistan’s population that was illiterate.27 Nor did Pakistan’s president, Iskander Mirza, formally endorse the plan.28
But the exercise was still useful in two respects. The first was that Pakistan’s government was becoming familiar with the planning process. Although it lacked the capacity to plan independently, going through the process was a significant step forward. “Pakistan is no longer a land of the blind, where the one-eyed advisor is king. More Pakistanis are now competent,” declared a Ford Foundation review of the advisory program.29
More immediately, the plan also helped secure additional U.S. assistance, even while U.S. officials were becoming more aware of the challenges ahead. As John Bell, who oversaw U.S. assistance in Pakistan, recalled, “We went back to Washington with [the five-year plan] and said IF (about six ifs all of which were no way certain): no flood, no famine, no war, no disaster of any kind and political stability, all these different things, we’ve got about a 50-50 chance of making this work if you put in about $200 million a year for at least five years.”30
As U.S. aid increased, examples of mismanagement began to multiply. In 1957, a few months after arriving as the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, James Langley sent a dire cable to Washington: “In Pakistan we have an unruly horse by the tail and are confronted by the dilemma of trying to tame it before we can let go safely. . . . I fear that our past generosity in helping out our friends has too often permitted them to avoid ‘grasping the nettle’ and facing their problems with the required spirit of urgency and determination.” Langley endorsed reviewing U.S. aid to eliminate “secondary or marginal projects.”31
Dennis Kux stumbled across one of those marginal projects. Kux, an economic officer with the U.S. State Department, was first stationed in Pakistan from 1957 to 1960. During a research trip some two hundred miles north of Karachi, his Pakistani hosts were eager to show him what U.S. generosity had given them. “Oh, you are from the American Embassy. You must see our aid project. We have a wonderful science laboratory,” they insisted. When Kux walked into the science facility, there was plenty of equipment, but he noticed that none of it was plugged in. “Well, there is a little problem,” his hosts explained. “We don’t have any electricity.” Apparently, no one in the aid process had bothered to check, or they had optimistically assumed power was on the way.32
Wasteful and embarrassing, these projects were still just a drop in the growing bucket of U.S. assistance, which was justified more on strategic merits rather than on economic impact. Understanding this, Pakistan’s leaders never missed an opportunity to invoke the threat of communism. In 1961, General Ayub Khan, who had taken power three years earlier in a coup, visited the United States. “We are pressing against you today as friends, and if we make good I think you will in some fashion get it back, in many ways you will get it back,” he told a joint session of the U.S. Congress. “If we do not make good and if, heaven forbid, we go under communism, then we shall still press against you but not as friends.”33
By the early 1960s, U.S. aid to Pakistan was exceeding $400 million a year. At its height during the first half of that decade, U.S. aid was more than half of Pakistan’s foreign aid, covering half of Pakistan’s imports and one-third of its development budget.34 Along with funds from the World Bank, a major donor to Pakistan and India, foreign lending allowed the Pakistani government to spend more on its military when those resources would have been better saved and invested in economic activities.
Pakistan was making progress, though, and the second five-year plan, covering 1960–1965, was more successful. Khan’s government put a greater focus on economic development and gave more authority to the central planning staff. Between 1960 and 1965, Western Pakistan nearly averaged 6 percent growth, inspiring talk of an “economic miracle.”35 “By 1965, Pakistan had the machinery to rationally examine and execute quite sophisticated economic policies. If it wanted to engage in considerable planning, it had the means to do so without making many more mistakes than would be inherent in the task or inevitable in most governments,” Papanek later wrote.36
Pakistan had developed a planning capacity, but it still lacked the capacity to execute those plans. “The obstacles, the obstacles,” John Bell recalled decades later. “The biggest problem, human resources and institutions. Not money. Money you need, yes. But, it’s not much use without human resources and institutions and you can’t shift them from factories or plants to recipient country. They have to be grown, trained, cultivated and then motivated to want to do it. That was the first time it really dawned on me that the success of [the Marshall Plan] was due to the Europeans and that third world nations did not have the requirements needed to achieve development so rapidly. Development is not recovery!”37
Pakistan’s first war with India, in September 1965, pushed it away from the United States and toward China. As fighting raged across the line of control in the Kashmir valley, the United States remained neutral and suspended aid despite its defense agreements with Pakistan.38 The same year, China made its first loan to Pakistan, roughly $60 million to import coal, cement, iron, steel, and electrical equipment.39 It was a small amount but symbolically important. While China could not replace U.S. aid, the loan made an important impact on Pakistani officials, who were feeling betrayed by the United States. “People in Pakistan were becoming disillusioned [with the United States]; a relationship which had been built up after a great deal of hard work during the fifties was ceasing to command respect,” Khan later wrote.40
“Thoughtless Urgency”
During this period of growing disillusionment, Pakistan and China embarked on building the Karakorum Highway, or KKH, which more than any other project has become a symbol of their lasting bond. Cutting through some of the world’s highest mountains, it is a physical connection put down at great human cost, including the deaths of hundreds of Pakistani and Chinese workers.41 Decades later, the project remerged at the center of CPEC, but the desire to view the highway as a symbol has obscured the project’s troubled beginnings and modest impact.
There are two versions of the highway’s origin story, according to Muhammad Khalid, a former brigadier general in the Pakistan Army Corps of Engineers turned historian. In one telling, China’s Premier Zhou Enlai met with Pakistan’s ambassador to China, General N. A. M. Raza, and offered to provide military hardware. But there was a catch. “We can give you anything you want, but you have to arrange the transportation yourself,” Zhou Enlai reportedly said. “Our navy cannot ship these because of the American intervention; we do not have the transport aircraft; and we have no road communication between the two countries.” When a second Pakistani delegation visited Beijing after the war with India and thanked Zhou for China’s support, he replied, “If we had a road link with Pakistan, don’t you think we would have been of greater help to you?”42
In the second version, Pakistani officials proposed the idea. After midnight, Zhou surprised his Pakistani guests by dropping by for an unscheduled meeting. When the conversation turned to China’s trade with the Middle East, Pakistan’s minister for commerce, who was also the defense adviser, pointed out that the nearest outlet for Chinese trade with the Middle East was Karachi, not the port of Shanghai. The key to increasing China’s trade, he claimed, was to reopen “an ancient trade route . . . lost to modern times, not only for trade but for strategic purposes as well.” Zhou sent for a map, and after a glimpse of the route, he allegedly asked, “When can our engineers meet?”43
What is clear is that from the beginning, the highway’s commercial importance was secondary to strategic concerns. A Pakistani government memo summarizing a conversation with Khan in May 1966 notes, “The President was pleased to remark that in order of priority the first urgency of the highway was strategic and one of the immediate significance. The second objective was economic and commercial importance of the highway, i.e. the opening up of an inaccessible region and the establishment of a land route to the adjourning country. The second was a long-term objective, as of necessity, the full utilization would be over a period of time.”44 Critically, the route ran through Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. Its construction would bind those remote areas closer to Pakistan, Khan reasoned, and over time erode India’s competing claims to the territory.
For China, the KKH offered a new supply line out of a shrinking, and increasingly menacing, neighborhood. Chinese officials were already responding to perceived threats by land and by sea. In 1964, they began a large investment program to move factories into southern and western China. The goal was to create an industrial base away from China’s urban centers that could serve as a reserve in the event of war.45 At the time, the United States was escalating its operations in Vietnam, and the Soviet Union was making inroads with Mongolia, where it stationed troops in 1966. Reflecting these priorities, Chinese officials insisted on building the KKH through Khunjerab Pass rather than Mintika Pass, which was closer to Soviet territory.46
The original plan was that each country would build the road within the territory it controlled. The Pakistan Army Corps of Engineers set up a dedicated unit, the Frontier Works Organization, to take the lead within Pakistan. Although the road was an open secret, in planning documents, Pakistan referred to the Chinese as “friends” to avoid antagonizing the United States.47 China agreed to provide Pakistan with construction equipment. At the time, Pakistani engineers were familiar with U.S. equipment, which was more durable. The Chinese, recognizing the shortcomings of their own equipment, not only agreed to Pakistan’s list of requested items but doubled it. The initial estimate assumed the project could be completed in five years.48
Afraid to disappoint Khan, the Pakistani Army’s engineer in chief agreed to the unrealistic timetable. Without having assembled, let alone trained, a workforce and without having conducted a detailed survey of the route, he agreed to begin the project in a matter of months. “Thoughtless urgency would become a particular feature of this mega project, and perhaps for all future ones,” writes Khalid. “Any presidential order, or for that matter any higher command dictates, would rarely be questioned by the Corps’ top brass regardless of the serious technical, financial, and administrative problems, time constraints or frictions of terrain, and weather.”49
When Pakistan’s route surveyors reached the Chinese border during the summer of 1966, a surprise was waiting for them. “The rugged mountains with steep slopes, the gushing rivers and glaciers suddenly vanished, as we drove across and saw thousands of Chinese working on the road,” remembers a Pakistani officer who was among the survey team. “They had, in fact, completed their side of the road before we commenced ours.”50 The Pakistani survey team had no geological experience but needed to make decisions about constructing the highest road in the world. They were asked to complete the survey, which covered over 250 kilometers, in six weeks. In the north, Pakistan’s soldiers were effectively foreigners in their own country.
The chaos continued a few weeks later, when Pakistan’s main construction force began arriving at Khunjerab Pass. As a Pakistani officer recalled, “An hour after reaching Khunjerab, the ignorant new arrivals started feeling giddy and sleepy, which they first regarded as normal fatigue due to hectic travelling. . . . Some people fell unconscious while conversing. Upon gaining consciousness the following day, some were still vomiting.”51 No one had warned the Pakistani soldiers about altitude sickness before sending them up to the sixteen-thousand-foot pass or advised them about the harsh climate. They discovered that their bulldozers were too cold to start in the morning and that other equipment did not work at all. It was a preview of the dangers that would plague Pakistan’s road workers, who were given precious little and told to move mountains.
After these false starts, Chinese officials did not have to offer twice to start building roads within Pakistan. While Pakistani officials were grateful for China’s assistance, they worried that the Chinese laborers could spread communism, especially in the remote areas where they would be working. But their countermeasures were haphazard at best. Pakistan ordered intelligence agents to camp near the Chinese workers, but they did not speak Chinese. Incredibly, Pakistan did not bother to establish a system for monitoring Chinese workers arriving and departing at the border. Official figures estimated that roughly eight thousand Chinese workers entered Pakistan to work on the KKH, but the actual figure is probably closer to twenty thousand.52
During the KKH’s first decade of construction, the Chinese workers won their hosts’ respect. They moved fast, using enormous amounts of explosives to cut through the mountains. It was dangerous work, and their techniques took a human and environmental toll. Workers perished in landslides, and the explosions destabilized the mountains for years. In June 1978, when General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq and China’s Vice Premier Geng Biao held a ceremony at Thakot Bridge, both sides paid tribute to these sacrifices.53 “The Karakoram Highway today heralds the dawn of a new era of Pak-China relations,” General Zia proclaimed.54
The road was technically operational, but it would not open to normal traffic until 1986. Even after that, it would remain limited by seasonal weather and plagued by landslides. And as the years passed, the shortcuts taken began to show as the road deteriorated. A landslide in 2010 blocked a river, creating a lake and flooding a section of the KKH. Until new tunnels opened in 2015, vehicles had to be ferried across the lake in handmade boats.55 By April 2016, there was enough need for repair that the two sides felt justified in holding a ground-breaking ceremony in the same place. Rather than opening the road, they would celebrate its reconstruction as part of CPEC. “Pakistan is poised for an economic takeoff,” Prime Minister Sharif assured the audience.56
“A White Elephant”
In 1958, Pakistan had purchased Gwadar, an enclave previously controlled by Oman that is roughly 120 kilometers from Iran. It became part of Baluchistan, Pakistan’s largest and least populated province. It needed development, and Pakistan’s president, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had an idea.
“We want a port in Baluchistan,” Bhutto told Nixon during a visit to the United States in September 1973. Bhutto knew the United States had paid for military access in the past. In the late 1950s, the United States used facilities near Peshawar to monitor Soviet communications and launch U-2 flights, until Francis Gary Powers, a retired U.S. Air Force officer working for the CIA, was shot down and captured in 1960. President Bhutto now hoped the U.S. Navy would be interested in Pakistan’s access to the Arabian Sea.
Like Khan before him, Bhutto hinted that in the absence of U.S. support, the Soviet Union would fill the void. “The Iranians are building a port at [Chabahar]. We need one on our coast. The Soviets are deeply interested in this coast and they have offered us to help with oil exploration, geological survey and that kind of thing. We would rather have a U.S. presence.”57 Bhutto later joked to the U.S. ambass
ador in Pakistan that he became so focused on this issue during his conversation with Nixon that he “literally left this problem” at the White House, forgetting to bring his papers with him after the meeting.58
Nixon diplomatically feigned interest in Bhutto’s idea. “The port proposal that you made intrigued me,” he told Bhutto. But Nixon was noncommittal. “We cannot say anything definitive on this today,” he said. “We have not checked with the Navy. Dr. Kissinger will look into this.”59
In fact, Kissinger had already looked into it and, echoing the advice of his National Security Council staff, recommended avoiding the project. “A new U.S. presence of this nature would antagonize the Soviets, the Indians, the Afghans, and perhaps others without contributing to U.S. interests either in the Persian Gulf or in South Asia,” he wrote in a pre-meeting memo for Nixon. “The key point, however, is that this would probably cost some hundreds of millions of dollars, and the political impact of the project will depend in part on its not being a white elephant.”60
In addition to recognizing the project’s shaky commercial prospects, Kissinger and his staff understood that Gwadar Port was chiefly a political project. “Bhutto’s main motive in seeking a Baluchistan port is probably to help him bring more commerce and jobs and win more support in that backward, sparsely populated, chronically unstable, opposition-dominated province,” the memo noted.61 Seeking those political payoffs, Bhutto’s successors rekindled the idea decades later, eventually turning Gwadar Port into one of CPEC’s most controversial projects. In response, India is expanding the competing port in Chabahar, Iran.