I’ve spent a good part of my life working across South Asia – in Bangladesh, in Pakistan, across the region – and one thing has always struck me as almost farcical. These are countries that share everything: the same rivers, the same food, the same music, and the same family trees in many cases. And yet, when I went to Bangladesh a few weeks ago, I travelled for 14 hours, whereas, it should have been no more than 3 hours. It struck home how broken South Asia is.
It is notable that getting from Dhaka to Karachi until just a few months ago meant flying through Dubai. Two neighboring countries, 14 years without a direct flight. Not because the planes didn’t exist. Because the politics got in the way. That, in a nutshell, is South Asia’s problem.
South Asia is the least economically integrated region in the world. Not the most conflict-ridden, not the poorest – the least connected. Intra-regional trade is stuck at around five percent of total trade. Five percent! The European Union moves over 60 percent of its goods within its own borders. Even ASEAN, which people sometimes forget includes countries with deep historical rivalries, manages 25 percent. We are not even in the same conversation. And what makes this especially painful is that it doesn’t have to be this way.
For a good stretch after partition, intra-regional trade across what is now South Asia ran somewhere around 60 per cent.
We used to be much more connected. For a good stretch after partition, intra-regional trade across what is now South Asia ran somewhere around 60 percent. These were connected economies, connected people. The countries that make up SAARC today were, in many ways, better positioned than the nations that became the ASEAN economic tigers. We had more, however we decided to go for less.
The European comparison is also worth pondering. Post-war Europe was a disaster zone – centuries of war, unimaginable destruction, deep mutual hatred between nations. And yet a generation of leaders made a decision: we will build economic ties so deep that war becomes unthinkable. They didn’t wait for everyone to like each other first. They built the architecture of interdependence and let time do the rest. The result is the longest period of peace and shared prosperity in European history.
South Asia went the other way. Every bilateral grievance became a wall. Every political dispute became a reason to close a border, cancel a flight, or tighten a visa. The estimated potential for intra-regional trade is $67 billion a year (World Bank estimate). South Asia is doing $23 billion. That $44 billion gap isn’t an abstraction, it is opportunity lost for the population, and particularly the youth of the region. South Asians can’t even visit their neighbors. Nothing illustrates the problem more simply than visas. For an ordinary Pakistani citizen, visiting Sri Lanka wasn’t easy until this week, when Sri Lanka announced visa free entry for forty countries, including Pakistan. This is their deliberate bet on openness to fuel its economic recovery. Bold move!
Pakistan has not yet reciprocated for Sri Lankans.
Good to see that at least one country is finally seeing its neighbors as opportunity – 20,000 Pakistanis visited Sri Lanka last week, while only a handful came to Pakistan. The Sri Lankan High Commissioner in Pakistan, who has fast become a dear friend, has a dream to bring 20,000 Sri Lankans to Pakistan – to see the beauty, to visit Gandhara, build economic partnerships and create P2P ties. With his zeal, I see it happening.
While SA has gone down the road to distrust, ASEAN – a bloc that includes countries with serious territorial disputes and complicated histories – is actively building a unified travel pass. The idea is simple: one document, freedom to move across the region, regardless of what’s happening diplomatically between governments. They figured out that people-to-people contact is not a security threat. It’s an economic engine.
Bangladesh and Pakistan just restored direct flights in January – after 14 years. Two flights a week between a country of 170 million and a country of 260 million. I don’t want to diminish it; it’s a real step forward, made possible by the changed political environment in Dhaka after 2024. But two flights a week is a symbol, not a solution.
More flights mean more business. More business means more trust. More trust means the political conversations get easier, not harder. You can’t build regional integration through summits alone. You build it through the accumulated weight of a million small interactions – a student visiting a university, a trader meeting a supplier, a family reunion that didn’t require three connecting flights through the Gulf.
We need to help each other now, and that is another reason this moment matters, beyond the economics. The world that funded a lot of South Asia’s development for decades is pulling back. Aid budgets are shrinking. Bilateral development programs are being cut. The region needs to look inward – and it has real things to offer itself.
Bangladesh has become genuinely world-class in certain areas of public health and financial inclusion. Sri Lanka has education and healthcare infrastructure that could serve as regional models. India has shown the world how to progress based on domestic comparative advantages, and Pakistan has made remarkable strides in digital public infrastructure, and leveraging remittances through incentives – know-how that matters for the whole neighborhood. But none of this knowledge travels without the people who carry it. And the people can’t travel if the visas aren’t there and the flights don’t exist.
The choice is simple. South Asia doesn’t need to solve Kashmir or resolve every historical issue before it integrates. That is the wrong sequencing. Europe and ASEAN didn’t do it that way. They built the economic ties first, and the political space followed.
Why not a SAARC travel pass? Why not hundreds of direct flights? Why not make Karachi, Mumbai, Colombo and Dhaka regional travel hubs to compete with UAE and Qatar? Why not reciprocal visa agreements starting with religious, business and academic communities? These aren’t grand geopolitical gestures. They’re practical decisions that any government could make tomorrow if it chose to.
Two billion people with shared history, shared geography, and shared challenges. The cost of keeping them apart is paid in lost trade, lost opportunity, lost knowledge, lost possibility. Regional connectivity isn’t naivety, it’s the only rational choice we have left.
The writer is a Senior Advisor at the Atlantic Council