Pakistan and China: Don't Fear Chabahar Port A closer look at what Iran’s Chabahar port deal with India and Afghanistan really means for China and Pakistan’s CPEC. By: Ahmad Bilal Khalil Published by The Diplomat January 31, 2017 Recently, on the sidelines of the sixth Heart of Asia Conference-Istanbul Process in Amritsar, India, Afghanistan and India planned to start air cargo transportation over Pakistan. The move will help greatly in exporting Afghan goods, such as fruits and carpets, to India and allowing Indian medicines to be imported to Afghanistan. According to Afghan official sources, both sides will soon sign a memorandum of understanding in this regard. This air cargo deal comes after Afghanistan and India, along with Iran, signed the Chabahar transport and transit agreement in Tehran. That trilateral agreement, centered on the Chabahar port, provoked suspicions in the region and negatively influenced hawkish views in both Pakistan and India. Strategists in both India and Pakistan are overestimating the potential of the Chabahar port and often frame it as the main rival to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which is anchored by Gwadar port in Pakistan. For Kabul, the Chabahar agreement was a sigh of relief. The Afghan ambassador to India, Shaida Mohammad Abdali, praised the deal as “heralding a new era in regional integration,” fulfilling “a billion hopes” and “a billion dreams.” The Chabahar deal means that Afghanistan is no longer dependent on Pakistan for its transit and trade with India and the rest of the world. It has diversified transit routes options for Kabul, giving an end to the Pakistani transit route’s monopoly. Enjoying this article? Click here to subscribe for full access. Just $5 a month. The Chabahar Dilemma? Given the importance of Chabahar in the current strategic milieu, observers might be surprised to know a similar arrangement was proposed by Afghanistan all the way back in the 1950s. At the beginning of the Cold War, Afghanistan-Pakistan relations were soured and even severed due to “Pashtunistanism” and the issue of the Durand line border between the two countries. Cold bilateral ties also damaged Afghan trade through Pakistan. Therefore, in the 1950s, Kabul asked Washington for assistance in carving out a new transit route through Iran to the Chabahar port, thus bypassing Pakistan completely. However, both the United states and Iran rejected the Afghan proposal regarding Chabahar port as being economically “impractical.”