Sample Essay: CPEC and "Indo–Middle East–Europe" — New War Fronts

Topic

CPEC and "Indo – Middle East – Europe", new war fronts (FPSC Competitive Examination 2024 — English Essay, Topic 2)

Recurring theme: CPEC and economic corridors has appeared in three papers — 2018, 2019 and 2024.

---

Rough Work

Exam Rough Work (what you actually write in the hall: about 200 words)

• Keywords: CPEC / IMEC / new war fronts. The metaphor is a claim: test it, do not inherit it.
• Type: argumentative. Thesis: corridors are not fronts, but treating them as fronts makes them one; make CPEC commercially viable and non-exclusive.
• CPEC: announced April 2015, about $46bn rising towards$62bn (sure); Matiari-Lahore HVDC line 2021 (sure); roughly half disbursed (verify); SEZs and ML-1 not delivered (verify).
• IMEC: announced at the G20 in Delhi, Sept 2023; the northern leg depends on Saudi-Israel normalisation; stalled after Gaza (sure).
• The field: Chabahar ten-year deal 2024 (sure); INSTC; Middle Corridor; Italy left the BRI Dec 2023 (sure).
• Logic: Malacca dilemma, about 80% of China's oil (sure); standards lock-in; the Hambantota debt-trap story is weak (sure); China holds about a quarter of Pakistan's external debt (verify).
• Attacks: Dasu July 2021; Karachi University April 2022; Besham March 2024; Karachi airport Oct 2024 (sure).
• Counter: complementary corridors; commerce breeds peace. Rebuttal: Norman Angell 1910; EU-Russia energy 2022 (sure).
• Way forward: fix the economics first; treat Balochistan politically, including Gwadar's grievances; hedge; publish terms and manage debt.
• Discourse: narration in the attacks; description of a Gwadar town without water; argumentation in IV.
• Hook: Dasu, July 2021. Closing idea: the belligerent role is all of the risk and none of the revenue.

Full thinking (study version)

Steps 1–2 of the playbook — roughly 25 minutes on the rough sheet.

The box

Topic:    CPEC and "Indo – Middle East – Europe", new war fronts
Keywords: CPEC / IMEC / NEW WAR FRONTS (a metaphor, not a fact)
Type:     Argumentative — test the metaphor, do not inherit it
Scope:    Geo-economics of corridors. NOT a project list. NOT the Silk Road.
Thesis:   Not fronts — but treating them as fronts is how they become one.

Topic → Prompt (the decode)

The examiner has planted a metaphor and the essay is an examination of it. "New war fronts" is a claim, not a description, and a script that simply adopts the phrase has done no thinking. Corridors move freight and influence; no territory changes hands and no army advances. The currency is investment.

But do not simply refuse it either — half of it is true. Where a corridor crosses contested ground and is financed by one great power against another's preference, a commercial project acquires a security liability. Pakistan has buried engineers to prove it.

The sharpest available point: metaphors in international politics are not descriptive, they are organising. A state that treats a railway as a front will garrison it, and a garrisoned railway is a target. Accepting the framing is itself the policy error — which is the argument the conclusion should land.

Trap 1: the game-changer essay. Promotional, factually thin, and it reads like a press release.

Trap 2: knowing nothing about IMEC and bluffing. IMEC barely exists — a memorandum whose northern leg depends on Saudi–Israel normalisation, suspended within a month of its announcement. Saying so is a fact most candidates will not have.

Brain dump (3 minutes, unfiltered)

CPEC — what was actually built

• Announced April 2015; envelope of roughly forty-six billion dollars, later enlarged towards sixty-two billion
• Generation: Sahiwal, Port Qasim, Karot — several thousand megawatts onto a grid then suffering 12-hour load shedding
• Matiari–Lahore HVDC line, 2021 — fixed the bottleneck that had made southern generation unusable in the north
• Sukkur–Multan motorway; Gwadar under a long-term concession
• Roughly half the headline envelope disbursed
• The part that did not happen: SEZs at Rashakai, Dhabeji and Faisalabad barely moving; ML-1 unfinanced; Phase II (agriculture, industry, B2B) still prospective

IMEC — and the fact most candidates will not have

• Announced September 2023 at the G20 in New Delhi — India, US, Saudi Arabia, UAE, EU, plus France, Germany, Italy
• A sea leg to the Gulf and a rail leg through Saudi Arabia and Jordan to the Mediterranean
• Its northern leg depends on Saudi–Israel normalisation, and the Gaza war suspended that within a month of the announcement
• IMEC is therefore a strategic intention with a signed memorandum — not yet a corridor

The crowded field

• Chabahar — India's ten-year operating deal, 2024, roughly 170km from Gwadar
• INSTC (Russia–Iran–India); the Middle Corridor across the Caspian, revived since 2022
• BRI spans ~150 states — but Italy withdrew in December 2023, so participation is reversible

The competitive logic

• Malacca dilemma — roughly 80% of China's imported oil; a Karakoram pipeline is economically dubious, but strategy is bought as insurance, not efficiency
• Whoever builds a network sets its gauge, signalling, payment systems and telecoms — and those persist for decades
• Hambantota: the popular debt-trap story is weak. Most Sri Lankan debt was owed to capital markets, and Colombo sought the lease. (Bringing this nuance separates the script instantly)
• The real concern is duller: China holds roughly a quarter of Pakistan's external debt on commercial terms, and a creditor whose refusal to roll over would cause default holds influence whether or not it uses it
• Special Security Division, ~15,000 personnel; China's Djibouti base, 2017

The attacks — narrate these, do not summarise them

• Dasu, July 2021 — nine Chinese engineers and four Pakistanis killed
• Karachi University, April 2022 — three Chinese teachers; the claimant named Chinese presence in Balochistan as the target
• Besham, March 2024 — five Chinese engineers; the Gwadar port complex itself assaulted the same month
• Karachi airport, October 2024 — two more Chinese nationals
• Strategic, not incidental: it imposes cost on two states at once, deters investment, and creates friction when one cannot protect the other's citizens

Gwadar's own grievance (the strongest point in the Way Forward)

• Months of protest in 2021–22 over fishing rights lost to trawlers, water, electricity and checkposts
• A port generating national revenue beside a town without drinking water is not merely unjust — it is strategically unsustainable, because it hands separatists the argument they most need

Rebuttal material

• Norman Angell, 1910 — financial integration had made war irrational. Correct about the economics, worthless as prediction: war came four years later
• EU–Russia energy interdependence in 2022 was weaponised, not deterrent — the precise danger of a single corridor patron
• Singapore, the Netherlands, the UAE — grew rich from geography by being indispensable to everyone rather than loyal to one

Stance (one sentence)

Corridors are not war fronts but instruments of geo-economic competition; the metaphor nevertheless captures something real, and Pakistan's interest lies in making CPEC commercially viable and non-exclusive rather than in behaving as a belligerent in someone else's contest.

Clusters

Sequence

Describe → competitive logic → counter and rebuttal → Pakistan's course → a conclusion that rejects the belligerent role as all of the risk and none of the revenue, and points at the states that got rich from geography by being useful to everyone.

Cut — and why

• The project-by-project CPEC inventory. Every road, every megawatt. It is a brochure, not an argument.
• The Silk Road and its revival. Ceremonial padding.
• Gwadar versus Chabahar as a full section. One sentence about 170 kilometres does all the work a page would.
• Predicting winners. Nobody knows, and confident prophecy is the cheapest thing in an essay.

---

Outline

• I. Introduction
  • Thesis: The metaphor in the topic is half right and dangerous where it is wrong. Corridors are not war fronts in any literal sense, and treating them as such invites exactly the zero-sum policy that would make the metaphor true. They are instruments of geo-economic competition, in which the contest concerns routes, standards and dependency rather than territory. Yet the metaphor preserves a real insight: where a corridor crosses contested ground and is underwritten by a rival patron, a commercial project acquires a security liability, which is precisely the Pakistani experience and precisely why Pakistan's interest lies in making CPEC commercially viable and non-exclusive rather than in treating it as an alignment.
• II. The Corridors Described
  • A. CPEC: origin, composition and what has actually been built
    1. Generation and transmission delivered
    2. The industrial phase that has not begun
  • B. IMEC: announcement, route and present condition
  • C. The wider field: Chabahar, the North–South corridor and the Middle Corridor
• III. The Competitive Logic That Produces the War-Front Language
  • A. Geo-economics: control of routes, chokepoints and technical standards
    1. The Malacca dilemma and insurance rather than efficiency
    2. Why the builder of a network sets its standards for decades
  • B. Debt, leverage and the contested debt-trap thesis
    1. Why the Hambantota account is weaker than commonly claimed
    2. The duller and more relevant concern: rollovers and influence
  • C. The militarisation of corridor protection
  • D. The proxy dimension: attacks on corridor personnel as strategic signalling
    1. Dasu, Karachi University, Besham and Gwadar
    2. Why attacking personnel imposes cost on two states at once
• IV. The Counter-Argument and Its Rebuttal
  • A. Counter-argument: the corridors are complementary, and commerce generates peace rather than conflict
  • B. Rebuttal: interdependence deters without preventing, as 1914 and 2022 both demonstrate
• V. The Way Forward for Pakistan
  • A. Repair the economics of CPEC before extending it
    1. Two functioning zones rather than eight announced ones
    2. The trade imbalance and the unused FTA concessions
  • B. Treat corridor security as a political question in Balochistan rather than only a military one
  • C. Hedge deliberately: refuse exclusivity and pursue Gulf, Afghan and Central Asian linkages
  • D. Publish the terms and manage the debt
  • E. Measure corridor success by jobs, exports and reliability
• VI. Conclusion

---

Essay

In July 2021 a bus carrying engineers to the Dasu hydropower site was destroyed by a bomb, killing nine Chinese nationals and four Pakistanis; a commercial project had become a target. The language of war has migrated into the vocabulary of commerce, and the topic set by the examiner registers the migration precisely. Trade routes are described as fronts, ports as strategic assets, loans as traps and standards as battlegrounds. The vocabulary is revealing and it is also hazardous, because metaphors in international politics are not merely descriptive; they organise perception and then justify policy. A state that regards a railway as a front will garrison it, and a state that garrisons a railway invites the adversary to treat it as a target. The argument advanced here is therefore deliberately two-sided. Corridors are not war fronts in any literal sense: no territory changes hands, no army advances, and the currency of the contest is investment rather than ordnance. They are instruments of geo-economic competition, in which the prize is the direction of trade, the ownership of infrastructure and the dependency that follows from both. Nevertheless, the metaphor preserves a genuine insight, for where a corridor crosses contested ground and is financed by one great power against the preference of another, a commercial project acquires a security liability that its balance sheet never anticipated. That is exactly the Pakistani experience, and it explains why Pakistan's interest lies in making the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor commercially viable and non-exclusive rather than in treating it as an alignment.

The first corridor requires accurate description, since it is more frequently invoked than examined. Announced during the Chinese president's visit to Islamabad in April 2015, the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor was presented as an investment envelope initially valued at approximately forty-six billion dollars and subsequently enlarged towards sixty-two billion. It formed the flagship of the wider Belt and Road Initiative. Its composition was weighted heavily towards energy and transport. Generation projects including the Sahiwal and Port Qasim coal plants and the Karot hydropower station added several thousand megawatts to a grid that had been suffering daily load shedding of twelve hours or more, and the high-voltage direct current transmission line from Matiari to Lahore, commissioned in 2021, addressed a transmission bottleneck that had rendered southern generation unusable in the north. Road construction including the Sukkur–Multan motorway proceeded, and the port at Gwadar was placed under Chinese operation on a long-term concession. Roughly half the headline envelope has been disbursed. Conversely, the projects intended to convert infrastructure into industry, namely the special economic zones at Rashakai, Dhabeji and Faisalabad and the upgrade of the Main Line 1 railway, have advanced slowly or not at all, and the second phase agreed from 2021 onwards, oriented towards agriculture, industrial relocation and business-to-business investment, remains largely prospective.

The second corridor is younger, more ambitious and considerably less real. The India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor was announced on the margins of the Group of Twenty summit in New Delhi in September 2023 through a memorandum signed by India, the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the European Union and three European states. Its design comprises a maritime segment from western India to Gulf ports and a land segment of rail and pipeline running through Saudi Arabia and Jordan towards the Mediterranean. The intention is to shorten transit times between India and Europe and to provide an alternative to routes through the Suez Canal and to Chinese-financed infrastructure. The project's difficulty is structural rather than technical: its northern segment depends upon political normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and the conflict that began in Gaza in October 2023 suspended that prospect within a month of the announcement. IMEC at present is therefore best described as a strategic intention supported by a signed memorandum, not as a corridor.

These two initiatives occupy a crowded field, and the topic's framing obscures how crowded it is. India secured a ten-year operating agreement for the Iranian port of Chabahar in 2024, roughly one hundred and seventy kilometres from Gwadar, seeking access to Afghanistan and Central Asia that bypasses Pakistan. The International North–South Transport Corridor linking Russia and Iran to the Indian Ocean has acquired new momentum since 2022, as has the Middle Corridor across the Caspian, which offers Europe a route to China avoiding Russian territory. Meanwhile the Belt and Road Initiative itself now encompasses some one hundred and fifty participating states, although Italy's withdrawal in December 2023 demonstrated that participation is reversible. The accurate picture is therefore not of two rival corridors but of a general re-drawing of Eurasian logistics, in which several projects overlap, most are incomplete, and each is promoted as though its rivals did not exist.

The competitive logic that generates the war-front vocabulary is nevertheless real, and its first element concerns routes and chokepoints. Approximately four-fifths of China's imported oil transits the Strait of Malacca, a passage that could be closed by a hostile navy, and Gwadar's strategic attraction lies in the theoretical possibility of an overland alternative. The economics of that alternative are doubtful, since pumping crude across the Karakoram at altitude would be enormously expensive; but strategic planning is frequently conducted in the currency of insurance rather than efficiency. Comparable reasoning drives the European interest in IMEC after the disruption of Red Sea shipping, and the Russian and Iranian interest in north–south routes beyond the reach of Western sanctions. Furthermore, the contest extends to standards, since the state that builds a network specifies its gauge, its signalling, its payment systems and its telecommunications equipment, and those specifications persist for decades and lock in suppliers.

The second element is financial influence, and it requires careful handling because the popular version is misleading. The proposition that China deliberately extends unpayable loans in order to seize assets rests principally on the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota, leased to a Chinese operator for ninety-nine years in 2017 after the country's debt distress. Detailed subsequent research, including work by scholars sympathetic to neither party, established that the majority of Sri Lanka's external debt was owed to capital markets rather than to China. It also established that Colombo sought the lease to raise foreign exchange, and that Beijing did not impose it. The genuine concern is more mundane and more relevant to Pakistan: debt owed to China constitutes roughly a quarter of Pakistan's external obligations, much of it on commercial rather than concessional terms. The country's repeated recourse to rollovers of Chinese deposits creates a dependency that is political in effect even where it is commercial in intention. A creditor whose refusal to roll over would precipitate default possesses influence irrespective of whether it ever chooses to exercise it.

The third element is the militarisation that corridor protection produces. Pakistan raised a Special Security Division of approximately fifteen thousand personnel specifically to protect Chinese nationals and projects, and later expanded it. China established its first overseas military base at Djibouti in 2017, within a few kilometres of an American installation. Ports built for commerce are routinely assessed for their naval potential, and the assessment itself alters the behaviour of rival states. Consequently a self-fulfilling dynamic operates: infrastructure is described as strategic, is therefore protected militarily, and the protection confirms the original description. This is the mechanism by which a corridor becomes something resembling a front, and it is driven as much by perception as by intention.

The fourth element is the one that has cost Pakistani and Chinese lives, and it should be narrated rather than summarised. In July 2021 a bus carrying engineers to the Dasu hydropower site was destroyed by a bomb, killing nine Chinese nationals and four Pakistanis. In April 2022 a suicide bombing at the Confucius Institute of the University of Karachi killed three Chinese teachers, and the Baloch separatist organisation claiming responsibility stated explicitly that its target was Chinese presence in Balochistan. In March 2024 five Chinese engineers were killed in an attack at Besham, and separatist fighters assaulted the Gwadar port complex itself; in October of that year a bombing near Karachi's airport killed two more Chinese nationals. The pattern is unmistakable and it is strategic rather than incidental: attacking the personnel of a corridor imposes cost on two states simultaneously, deters further investment, and generates friction between partners when one cannot protect the other's citizens. In this narrow and serious sense, the corridor has indeed become a front.

The case for treating these corridors as complementary deserves attention. It holds that the war-front framing is alarmist and analytically lazy. The corridors may be complementary because Asian trade volumes can sustain several routes, and shippers will use whichever is most economical. Many states also participate in more than one initiative. Gulf governments, for example, host Chinese investment while supporting the IMEC proposal. And that commerce historically generates constituencies for peace, because traders lobby against the disruption of their own markets. Proponents add that the practical obstacles to every corridor are commercial rather than military: IMEC awaits regional normalisation, ML-1 awaits financing, and Chabahar awaits sanctions relief. This suggests that competition is being conducted through balance sheets rather than through arms.

The rebuttal concedes the descriptive accuracy and disputes the inference. Economic interdependence raises the cost of conflict and has repeatedly failed to prevent it. Norman Angell argued in 1910 that the financial integration of Europe had rendered war irrational, and the argument was correct about the economics and worthless as a prediction, since the continent went to war four years later. More recently, Europe's deep energy interdependence with Russia neither deterred the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 nor protected the buyers; the relationship was weaponised instead, which is the precise danger that dependency on a single corridor patron creates. Furthermore, the complementarity argument assumes that corridors are built to move goods, whereas several are plainly built to move influence, and a project whose returns are strategic rather than commercial does not respond to commercial logic. The correct conclusion is therefore intermediate: corridors are not fronts, but they are the terrain on which rivalry now operates, and terrain has a way of acquiring soldiers.

For Pakistan the practical implications begin with economics rather than with strategy, because a corridor that does not pay cannot be defended indefinitely. CPEC's first phase delivered generation capacity and transmission. It also added capacity payment obligations denominated in foreign currency to a power sector already carrying circular debt in the trillions of rupees. The second phase, which was to convert transit infrastructure into industrial production through special economic zones and relocated manufacturing, has barely begun, and without it Pakistan will have financed a road through its territory rather than an economy along it. Priorities are identifiable: making one or two zones genuinely operational with reliable power, functioning customs and transparent land allocation, rather than announcing eight. Securing financing for the railway upgrade on terms the budget can sustain. And addressing the trade imbalance, since Pakistan's exports to China remain a small fraction of its imports and the concessions available under the bilateral free trade agreement remain substantially unused.

Security must then be understood as a political problem before it is a military one. The attacks described above occur overwhelmingly in Balochistan and along the routes leading from it, and the province's grievance has a material basis that troops cannot address: Gwadar's own residents protested for months in 2021 and 2022 over fishing rights lost to trawlers, inadequate water and electricity, and the proliferation of checkpoints in their own town. A port generating national revenue while the adjacent population lacks drinking water is not merely unjust; it is strategically unsustainable, because it supplies separatist movements with the argument they most need. Consequently, local employment quotas that are enforced rather than announced, revenue sharing visible within the district, and the restoration of political rather than administrative government in the province are corridor security measures in the most practical sense.

The third requirement is deliberate hedging, which means refusing the exclusivity that both patrons would prefer. Pakistan's geography is its principal asset and its value derives from being usable by everyone; a route that serves a single client is a dependency, whereas a route that serves several gives bargaining power. This argues for pursuing transit arrangements with Afghanistan and Central Asia notwithstanding their difficulty, for maintaining the Gulf relationships through which remittances and investment flow, for declining to treat IMEC as an adversary project when Pakistan has no capacity to obstruct it, and for keeping the eastern border question separate from the corridor question rather than allowing each to hostage the other. Small and middle powers preserve autonomy by multiplying their partners, not by perfecting one of them.

Finally, governance of the arrangement requires transparency that has so far been withheld. The terms of major project agreements, including tariffs, sovereign guarantees and dispute resolution provisions, have not been published in full. The resulting information vacuum has been filled by rumour on one side and by official assurance on the other, to the benefit of neither. Publication would permit parliament to assess contingent liabilities, would discipline negotiation on future projects, and would deprive hostile commentary of its most effective material. Alongside disclosure, a debt management strategy that sequences repayment obligations against realistic export growth is indispensable, since the corridor's strategic value collapses entirely if its financing precipitates the crisis it was meant to avert.

Commercial performance must become the main measure of a corridor's success. A new road or power plant has value, but its contribution to prosperity depends on whether firms can use it to produce and sell goods. Pakistan's Special Economic Zones under CPEC should therefore be assessed through operational factories, export earnings and sustained employment rather than announcements or ceremonial openings. The Board of Investment and provincial industrial departments can publish comparable annual results, including land utilisation and access to electricity. Customs authorities should record whether transport improvements actually reduce delays for exporters. These indicators would help distinguish projects that serve the wider economy from those that depend indefinitely on public subsidy. A corridor justified by trade should ultimately be judged by trade. That standard would also reduce the temptation to portray every commercial decision as a victory or defeat in a strategic contest.

The verdict on the examiner's metaphor is therefore that it should be used with care and not discarded. Corridors are not war fronts, and the states building them are competing for market share, transit fees and long-term influence rather than for ground. Nevertheless, the competition is conducted with an intensity that borrows from strategic rivalry, it produces garrisons, it attracts violence from actors who understand the symbolism precisely, and it creates dependencies that can be weaponised when relations deteriorate. Pakistan sits at the intersection of these pressures with less economic weight than any of the principals involved, which makes its position simultaneously precarious and valuable. The country's error would be to accept the war-front framing and to behave as a belligerent in someone else's contest, since that role offers all of the risk and none of the revenue. The alternative is unglamorous and considerably more profitable: to build a corridor that actually carries freight, to give the province through which it passes a reason to protect it, to sell access to whoever wishes to buy, and to remember that the states which have prospered from geography, such as Singapore, the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates, did so by becoming indispensable to everyone rather than loyal to one.

Check before use

• Recheck how many economic zones are operational and the current status of the proposed IMEC route.
• Confirm the figures and terms of project financing and cited security incidents.