“If the world were an egg, Hurmuz would be its yolk” says a historian few centuries back. Even today in this speedy world of communication, 90 percent of global trade and 65 percent of oil, travel by sea. Globalisation has been made possible by the cheap and easy shipping of containers on tankers, and the Indian Ocean accounts for half the world’s container traffic.
Moreover, 70 percent of total traffic of petroleum products passes through the Indian Ocean, on its way from the Middle East to the Pacific, slithering through the world’s principal oil shipping lanes, including the Gulf of Aden and Oman, as well as some of world commerce’s main chokepoints, the straits of Hurmuz, and Malacca. Some 40 percent out of all traded crude oil passes through the Strait of Hurmuz.
Throughout history, sea routes have mattered more than land routes; India’s trade with the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf and Iran, with which India had long enjoyed close economic and cultural ties, is flourishing. Approximately 3.5 million Indians work in the six Arab states of the Gulf Cooperation Council and send home $4 billion in remittances annually.
As India’s economy continue to grow, so will its trade with Iran and it is also looking forward with Iraq once the country recovers. Afghanistan has been made a strategic rear base for India against Pakistan. That way blocking all trade routes by land from Pakistan to Central Asian states, realising Pakistan’s strategic importance as the main overseer, having a capacity to monitor all the traffic coming out from the Strait of Hurmuz.
Mohan Malik, a scholar at the Asia-Pacific Centre for Security Studies in Hawaii, raised his concerns over India’s dependence on imports passing through the straits close to the Pakistan’s Makran coast at Gwadar, where the Chinese are helping Pakistan develop deep water ports, as ‘Hurmuz Dilemma’.
This is unnerving for India, with China building deep water ports to its west and east, India fears being encircled by China unless it expands its own sphere of influence. The United States is quietly encouraging India to balance against China, whereas it is seeking greater cooperation with China.
Aware of how much the international economy depends on sea traffic the US admirals are thinking beyond the fighting and winning of wars to responsibilities such as policing global trading arrangements. Indian Ocean and its adjacent waters are going to be a central theatre of global conflict and competition. This was the conclusion made in a document, ‘Marine Corps Vision and strategy 2025’. If oil exports from the Persian Gulf were significantly reduced, the effects on America’s well-being would be profound. To prevent this, the United States shall keep on preventing any local power from establishing hegemony in the gulf.
United States, India and Iran are doing the right thing: formulating a foreign policy whose goal is to ensure the safety and prosperity of their own people. It sounds incongruous when our political elite expects or demands world powers to watch our economic interests, instead of working for their own people.
Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, in an interview aired on Sunday, said Pakistan was doing more than its share in fighting the Frankenstein of terror created jointly by many world powers including the United States. She is right, but have we ever realised, why this Frankenstein was created? A foreign minister is supposed to address the cause, effect and the solution to combat this Frankenstein. Why are we petrified of talking to the world powers, looking into their eyes and telling them that this Frankenstein was created by them for their long term vilified objectives, and that they should now stop meddling in our homeland?
In the presence of so many unsolved bilateral issues between Pakistan and India, it was a horrible idea to give a direct role to India in Afghanistan by the US. The strategy sends a strong signal to Islamabad about the US foreign policy vision in this region for the 21st century, where India clearly holds a key position. Pakistan is entitled to its strategic objectives and US is being unappreciative in ignoring these objectives. We have already committed a miscalculation by giving up to the American demands in the Soviet-Afghan war as well as in 2001, without spelling out our strategic objectives and then extending any cooperation.
We are now paying a price for our faulty policies in Balochistan where all our ‘friends’ and foes are squandering money, arms, and all pertinent support to make the province unruly. Balochistan is strategically the most important province of Pakistan and will play a very important role, especially in the country’s economic future. What needs to be addressed is to define the real issue of Balochistan? Gwadar’s proximity to the Strait of Hurmuz is the main reason of the unrest in Balochistan. Robert Kaplan’s statement can easily help us in determining the mindset of our allies, who pronounces that Gwadar’s development would unlock the riches of Central Asia.
However, we have to promote our national interests and to turn this strategic port into a global economic hub. For this we will have to tell between the covert enemies and the real friends, domestically as well across the frontiers. There are concealed hands that support insurgency in Balochistan through safe havens provided to the radical elements in different countries to destabilise Pakistan.
The ban on jihadi organisations and their resources being frozen are common international phenomena. This creates a feeling of fretfulness and cynicism amongst the Pakistani intelligentsia.
Our political leadership, writers and media need to recapture the souls and minds of our Baloch brethren, revise strategies based on lessons learnt from our past crises, place programmes that help Baloch people to build robustness, achieve resourcefulness, enhance their ability to recover swiftly so that they turn into an insurmountable impediment for the plentiful foreign intelligence agencies who are working fervidly to make Pakistan a failed state and undermining its strategic muscle.
The writer is an architect and a freelancer.