On November 29, Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif broke ground on a section of the Hazara Motorway, which will connect the outskirts of the capital city of Islamabad to China through the Karakoram Highway. The four-lane, fenced road in mountainous Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province will, according to current projections, take two years to complete and cost $297 million.
The groundbreaking move, China’s Xinhua News Agency proclaims, “signal[s] the implementation of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor agreement.” When the Corridor is completed at the turn of the decade, China will have effectively cut Pakistan in two. At the same time, Beijing will be able to use the Corridor’s new transportation links to faster deploy its forces to areas disputed by Pakistan and India.
In early November in Beijing, Sharif signed Corridor pacts authorizing $45.6 billion in projects in his country. Of that total, $33.8 billion is allocated for electricity generation—the addition of 16,520 megawatts by 2021—and $11.8 billion for transportation infrastructure.
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