Gwadar Port - Great Game
Located at the entrance of the Persian Gulf and about 460 kms from Karachi, Gwadar has had immense geostrategic significance on many accounts. The continued unstable regional environment in the Persian Gulf in particular as a result of the Iran/Iraq war, the Gulf war and the emergence of the new Central Asian States has added to this importance. Considering the Geo-economic imperative of the regional changes, the ADB's Ports Master Plan studies considered an alternate to the Persian Gulf Ports to capture the transit trade of the Central Asian Republics as well as the trans-shipment trade of the region.
The port of Gwadar promised multifarious posibilities. Its strategic location in the Arabian Sea could facilitate electronic surveillance. Indeed Gwadar in Baluchistan and Herat in Afghanistan lie diametrically opposite to each other within the limits of Mackinder's Rimland. They have been pivotal in the "Great Game", or in the Central Asian Question. In the power tussle of the two super powers there cannot be any tangible outcome without referrence to these vital points in the region. They serve as two tiers of the Eastern Dyke of the "Northern tier" formed by the British and later supported by the US to stop communist Russia's advance in the region.
What Herat was to land based military powers of Eurasia, Gwadar was to the maritime powers, in the Indian Oceans. In their own times, Herat was important to the Greeks, Sakas, Mongols, Persians, Russians, Germans, and the British, Likewise, Gwadar was important to the Greeks, Arabs, Portugues and the British. Then both were important to the Soviet Union and the USA, the two chief contenders in the "Great Game" which had truly been revived. Gwadar's proximity to the Gulf and South Asia, its access to the Middle East, Central Asia, Eurasia and the World Oceans, lent it a unique geo-strategic importance. The Port of Bandar Abbas located laterally opposite to Gwadar in Iranian Baluchistan was somewhat comparable. Had it been occupied by the USA that would have created political implications not only for Pakistan but also for other states including the Soviet Union.
It was therefore necessary for Pakistan to seek to remove this foreign enclave from its Makran coast. On September 6, 1958, Pakistan through the good offices of the British Government, with which Prime Minister Feroz Khan Noon had long and intimate relations, purchased the port of Gwadar for a price that seemed high at that time. Later developments showed that it was an act of statesmanship.
It was generally believed in the US at the time that the Soviet forces moved into Afghanistan in 1979 with the ultimate motive of capturing oil of the Persian Gulf. The economic realities of the second half of the 20th century [ie, oil] had added a new dimension to Russia's age old quest for a warm water port in the gulf. More than half of the oil involved in international trade comes from the region. In the words of former Secretary of State Edmund Muskie, "the consequences of a cutoff of Persian Gulf oil, for us in the west, are too catastrophic to ignore". A Soviet naval base in Iranian Chah Bahar or Pakistani Gwadar would carry a message of its own to the entire Indian Ocean littoral. It would give the Soviets the means to lean particularly hard of those states that supply strategicminerals to the West and Japan. This could give Moscow the potential for coercing Western Europe and Japan into trading oil for advanced technology. Keeping in view the large differential in their relative dependence on Gulf oil, such a policy could beused to drive a wedge between the United States and her closest allies. By this reckoning the politico-economic stakes in the Gulf were nothing less than global in nature.
Afghanistan's importance to the Soviet Union in 1979 was that this small mountainous nation lay like a fortress protecting the southeastern flank of the 'oil crescent.' Lying between the unstable regimes of Ayotollah Khomeini in Iran and President Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan, the Afghan mountain passes led directly to the Iranian oil fields to the west and south to the dissident Pakistani province of Baluchistan, whose fiercely independent and anti-Zia tribesmen controlled the Port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea. Control of the Port of Gwadar would provide access to the warm waters of the Persian Gulf, long a Soviet objective. A Russian supported secession by Baluchistan would give the Soviet union access to Arabian Sea ports, access to the Indian Ocean, and the opportunity to threaten the Persian Gulf oil supply routes. Iran's position was certainly threatened by this Soviet coercion as well. Access to the Port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea in Baluchistan would have provided the Soviets with an opportunity for the first time to interfere with the oil flow through the Persian Gulf.
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