Will plan for port in Pakistan with US involvement fuel regional tensions?
Under the plan, the port in Balochistan will be used to access Pakistan’s critical minerals in a region where China has a strong presence
Advisers to Pakistani army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir have approached US officials regarding the proposal for American investors to build and run the port in Pakistan, according to a Financial Times report last week.
Located in Gwadar district in the province of Balochistan, which borders Afghanistan and Iran, the port in the town of Pasni is envisioned as the gateway for Pakistan’s critical minerals.
The move comes after Munir and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif held a meeting with US President Donald Trump at the White House in September. During the meeting, Sharif sought investments from American companies in the agriculture, technology, mining and energy sectors.
Daniel Markey, a senior fellow with the South Asia and China programmes at the Stimson Centre, said that given the warming of ties between Trump and Pakistan’s leaders, he would consider ways to turn the proposal for the port into a reality.
As a real estate developer, the president and some of his top advisers might be “open to entertaining ideas that previous administrations would have dismissed out of hand”. This was partly due to the Trump administration’s inclination “to mix private and public business deals in unorthodox ways”, Markey said.