How can Afghanistan leverage the Belt and Road Initiative for its own growth, especially in infrastructure? Janan Mosazai:
Afghanistan was one of the first countries in the region, if not the first, to welcome the Belt and Road Initiative, which we see as a very visionary and transformational proposal by Chinese President Xi Jinping. It will promote cooperation among countries in the region and beyond, enhancing economic interactions and integration, and deepening cultural cooperation and exchanges and people-to-people interactions.
Given the capabilities of China, with all the resources it possesses and the experience it has accumulated over the past decades, we see the initiative as a program that we in Afghanistan hope to leverage for our national plans. These include the integration of Afghanistan’s economy, linkage of Afghanistan’s infrastructure with the region, and basically the realization of our President Ashraf Ghani’s vision of reviving Afghanistan’s historical and rightful role in the region as a land bridge, a center of trade and a transit hub through which people, goods, capital and energy flow, and also as a platform for win-win cooperation.
Afghanistan is an official partner of the initiative. We signed the MoU last May in Beijing, and our two presidents have identified three priority sectors under it: railways, roads and fiber optic networks.
We have a five-nation railway project that will connect China through Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to Afghanistan and onward to Iran. It’s a critical project that will not only link China to Iran, but also connect Central Asian republics through Afghanistan to Iran and through another railway network in the east and south Afghanistan to South Asia. That’s also a priority in our cooperation in the Belt and Road Initiative because not just two countries are involved, but five, which are all friends and good neighbors.
A direct cargo service between China and Afghanistan started in August 2016 which links Haimen City in Jiangsu Province to Hairatan in Balkh Province in north Afghanistan via Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. This is perhaps the first time since the days of the ancient Silk Road that we have direct trade transportation between China and Afghanistan. We look forward to making this a two-way cargo service, so that it not only transports Chinese goods to Afghanistan, but also carries Afghan goods—agricultural produce and natural resources, including minerals that are too heavy to be transported otherwise—in the opposite direction.
Once we establish the five-nation railway, cargo can also travel from China to Iran and onward. So, we see that as an important example of the kind of cooperation we can achieve in the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, both between Afghanistan and China bilaterally and with other partner countries in the region, especially our common neighbors.
The cargo train travels once every two weeks. The journey itself takes less than a week, not taking into consideration the customs clearance procedures required at each border. Customs cooperation is also a key component of the Belt and Road Initiative. It will be one of the main topics of discussion at the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in May. That’s one of the things that countries wanting to enhance trade relations and economic integration have to do, so that traders and businesspeople don’t have to waste time going through endless hours of paperwork at each border customs checkpoint.