
China-Pakistan Economic Corridor faces new threats from militancy
- Observers are questioning if militant groups are receiving external backing in their bid to launch attacks aimed at disrupting the US$62 billion megaproject
- Pakistan’s long-time rival India is locked in a military stand-off with China at their de facto border, the disputed Line of Actual Control
But supporters of the project, including the Pakistani government, maintain that Islamabad will not end up being a client state of Beijing’s, and that the CPEC is its best shot at economic development.
Will they have a chance to be proven right?
On July 25, Baloch Raji Ajoi Sangar – an umbrella organisation for Baloch separatist groups – announced an alliance with the Sindudesh Revolutionary Army, another armed group that operates in Pakistan’s southeastern Sindh province.

In a statement, the groups said that the provinces of Sindh and Balochistan are equally affected by China’s “expansionist” and “oppressive” policies that aimed to “subjugate” them. Zhou Rong, a senior fellow at Renmin University’s Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies who has researched Pakistan and Afghanistan, said the groups had joined forces as they were individually weak, with terrorism in Pakistan falling to “2 to 3 per cent of what it used to be in 2009”.
Separatists in Sindh are capable of little more than “toppling telephone poles and damaging railway tracks”, according to Zhou, who said the groups had not joined forces previously because their leaders were tribal chiefs.
“But now, most of their chiefs are from the new generation with college degrees and education,” he said.
There are concerns that external forces are supporting these militants, who are already waging their own separatist struggles with Islamabad.
Countries like India and the US are trying to create disturbance in the region and create hurdles for the early completion of this project
Raffaello Pantucci, a senior associate fellow at London’s Royal United Services Institute whose research focuses on terrorism and counterterrorism, said that while separatist groups in Pakistan had not been able to mount “effective” attacks against Chinese interests, they had improved their capabilities, “which speaks to some level of external support”.
Pakistan’s new Kashmir map fuels India’s fears of two-front war
Syed Inam ur Rahman, a professor at the International Islamic University in Pakistan, agreed, saying that “countries like India and the US are trying to create disturbance in the region and create hurdles for the early completion of this project”.
The risk of external factors derailing the controversial megaproject are now higher than ever.
