Daily Times

Last week, while talking to reporters, United States President Joe Biden disclosed that he suggested to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in a phone call that democratic countries should have an infrastructure plan to rival China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The US President’s Biden’s remarks came in the wake of his statement, a day earlier, when he said that he would prevent China from passing the US to become the most powerful country in the world, pledging to invest heavily to ensure the US prevails in the ever-growing rivalry between the world’s two largest economies.

China’s BRI is a multitrillion-dollar infrastructure scheme launched in 2013 by President Xi Jinping involving development and investment initiatives that would stretch from East Asia to Europe. The project would significantly expand China’s economic and political influence but also ensure the economic progress of the countries that have joined it.

The US, Japan, Australia and India have raised concerns regarding the efficacy and transparency of the BRI. Biden’s concerns regarding China’s BRI notwithstanding, the US President plans to unveil a multi trillion-dollar plan to upgrade US infrastructure next week. He said this would ensure increased US investment in promising new technologies, such as quantum computing, artificial intelligence and biotechnology.

While airing its concerns and seeking to encourage private sector-investment for overseas projects to rival those of the BRI, Washington has yet to be able to convince countries that it can offer an alternative to the state-backed economic vision put forward by Beijing under BRI.

The concept of a parallel BRI by Biden is not new. During her 2011 tour of India, the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had unveiled the idea of the US New Silk Road (NSR) Strategy. She had declared:

If Afghanistan is firmly embedded in the economic life of the region, it will be better able to attract new investments, benefit from its resource potential, provide increasing economic opportunities and hope for its people

[Let’s build] an international web and network of economic and transit connections. That means building more rail lines, highways, [and] energy infrastructure, like the proposed pipeline to run from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan, Pakistan into India (TAPI). It means upgrading the facilities at border crossings. And it certainly means removing the bureaucratic barriers and other impediments to the free flow of goods and people.

Hillary Clinton’s idea was perhaps an extension of the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), which comprises a series of commercially based logistic arrangements connecting Baltic and Caspian ports with Afghanistan via Russia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. The NSR initiative is focused on Afghanistan as a main hub for economic integration and transportation. It was expected that the Silk Road initiative would help provide the much-needed support to Afghanistan after US troops departed the region in 2014. Hindsight is 20/20 but the US-led NSR initiative envisaged:

If Afghanistan is firmly embedded in the economic life of the region, it will be better able to attract new investments, benefit from its resource potential, provide increasing economic opportunities and hope for its people.

Despite skepticism, a number of important steps toward the US-led NSR initiative have already been completed. At the Tokyo Symposium on the Silk Road in 2012, US Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Geoffrey Pyatt, claimed:

The New Silk Road is already being built. Electricity from Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan is powering small businesses and government buildings in Afghanistan; rail connections are being built between Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan and a new rail line from the Uzbek border to Mazar-e-Sharif has been completed; Turkmen, Pakistani, and Indian officials have finalised a pricing agreement for the TAPI gas pipeline. Overall, the US Government identifies about 40 infrastructure projects that it considers important parts of the NSR initiative.

Hopefully Biden was referring to the US-led NSR.

As far as China’s mega project is concerned, over 100 countries have signed agreements with China to cooperate in BRI projects like railways, ports, highways and other infrastructure. According to a Refinitiv database, as of mid-last year, more than 2,600 projects at a cost of $3.7 trillion were linked to the initiative. However, China said last year that about 20 percent of BRI projects had been “seriously affected” by the coronavirus pandemic.

There has also been pushback against BRI from countries that have criticized projects as costly and unnecessary. Beijing scaled back some plans after several countries sought to review, cancel or scale down commitments, citing concerns about costs, erosion of sovereignty, and corruption.

For the US, there are two options, one that more thought goes into Biden’s concept of a parallel BRI. It would perhaps be more pragmatic and cost effective for the US to join China’s New Silk Road Project, sit on its Board of Directors, ensure transparency as well as the equitable distribution of profits, rather than reinventing the wheel.

The key factor in all these projects is peace and stability in Afghanistan, for which numerous nations are striving but none more than the US and Pakistan. The US wants to extricate itself from a war in which it has been involved in the longest, while Pakistan continues to face terror attacks being launched by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the surrogates of the Islamic State, who are entrenched in Afghanistan.

Development projects in the region, BRI, China Pakistan Economic Corridor or TAPI, all can proceed smoothly once Afghanistan becomes peaceful.

The writer is a retired Group Captain of PAF. He is a columnist, analyst and TV talk show host, who has authored six books on current affairs, including three on China