What CPEC can learn from KKH A new book explores the potential of the future with a historic example

Brief overview:

Pakistan’s geographical position remains pivotal to its development and in that spirit

infrastructure investment could play a critical role in promoting internal harmony and

shaping its external relations. Yet precious few scholars have focused on the centrality of

‘roads’ as identity markers, drivers of competition, rivalry and connectivity among nations.

It is in this broader geo-political context that American anthropologist, Chad Haines’ book

Nation, Territory and Globalization in Pakistan Traversing the Margins (Routledge 2012,

Manohar 2016) provides some refreshing insights and interpretations on the importance of

geographical location, its role in nation-state formation and its interface with forces of

globalization.

A distinguishing feature of this research is its extraordinary focus on the Karakoram

Highway (KKH) as a centerpiece of identity, booster of China-Pakistan friendship and

promisor of economic growth and development in the case of Pakistan. Was the KKH

indeed conceived as a potential ‘game changer’? In Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s imagination it was,

as Haines perceptively reminds us, “The KKH is two roads”—the Sinkiang-Gilgit road

connecting Pakistan with Central Asia and the national highway integrating Pakistan. It has

certainly increased mobility, connectivity and transport of goods and people, hence

transforming locale and communities. In any case, it has been China’s pioneering road

construction engineering in the mighty Himalayan peaks, a project in which Pakistan

contributed substantially. Haines’s work becomes all the more relevant and timely as

Pakistan deliberates, contests and evolves consensus on building another ‘road’: the China-

Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

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