But here in the mountains, and all the way down to the sea, China is now pouring in billions of dollars in investment, as part of a bigger project to re-create the fabled Silk Road.
Beijing hopes in doing so to bolster China`s economy, discourage separatism in its mostly Muslim western regions and establish another bridgehead in Asia with which to exert its influence. A modern highway through Pakistan would give Chinese commerce a kind of back door, opening up a new and much shorter sea route to customers in the West.
The Karakorum Highway, named for the towering mountain range it crosses here, is to be a mainstay of President Xi Jinping`s hugely ambitious plan for the coming decades: to restore China to what he sees as its proper place, at the center of Asia.
This will require many billions of dollars in investment across almost the entire continent, as China matches a strategic vision to its still considerable economic might. And it is bidding, quietly but determinedly, to surpass the United States as Asia`s regional power.
Just a few miles down the mountain into Pakistan, where the air is a bit thicker, Mohammad Noor, at the age of 44, fulfills a generations-old family tradition: escorting more than 1,000 goats and sheep to summer pasture. But now he keeps his footing on a new section of highway. And now the young people who don`t want to look after sheep and goats can find opportunity.
"The future," said Noor, "is Pakistan and China."
Here, trucks carrying Chinese goods could soon begin a 1,700-mile descent through Pakistan, to a saltwater port where the freight will be put on ships bound for markets in Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
In its efforts to re-create the old Silk Route that for centuries linked Asia to the Middle East, and brought wealth to both, China will also be trying to lift Pakistan toward prosperity. As part of its "Belt and Road" economic development strategy, it plans to spend $46 billion here on an array of projects.
"An old strategic partnership is graduating into an economic partnership," said Ahsan Iqbal, Pakistan`s minister for planning and development. "China has a vision . . . and Pakistan can be the corridor for a new regional block, comprising the engines of world growth where 3 billion people live."
If China can ship more of its merchandise along this route instead of by way of the South China Sea, it will reduce transport times to some of the world`s fastest-growing markets. China also will be able to shift more of its manufacturing base to its rural, western provinces, with an eye toward weakening political unrest there while curbing pollution in its eastern cities.
A boat crosses Attabad Lake near where Chinese engineers are working on a highway bridge in the Karakorum Mountains.
In the process, China hopes to accomplish something the United States has largely been unable to do over the past decade: give Pakistan an ironclad, long-lasting incentive to keep cracking down on terrorist groups.
But Americans, disillusioned by decades of unfruitful involvement in Pakistan, are skeptical that China will have any more success here -- or even be able to carry out all of its ambitious plans.
The new Pakistan-China Economic Corridor will move from the mountains down the Karakorum Highway into central Pakistan. From there, even more highways will be built to provide access to Gwadar Port in Baluchistan.
The initial outlines of that corridor are already visible here in the north, where the highway snakes past mountains, glaciers and rocky gorges.
At times, motorists can see the donkey trails from the original Silk Route, along which traders traveled for more than 600 years before the 15th century.
China is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade the highway, one of the world`s most dangerous. Chinese engineers are smashing through mountains to build dozens of miles of tunnels, some of which are inscribed with the phrase "Pak-China Friendship Tunnel." They are adding bridges, guardrails and concrete overhangs to funnel landslides and avalanches away from travel lanes.
"The Chinese can do anything," Ramazan Ali, 32, said from a boat while traveling across Attabad Lake, created in 2010 when a landslide damned the Hunza River, flooding the Karakorum Highway and surrounding villages. China has just built four large tunnels on the south end of the 13-mile lake to reopen the highway. "Everything they develop benefits the people."
Some residents here are worried about traffic and pollution.
"There will be a lot of environmental issues in the near future," said Sahib Noor, a farmer in Karimabad, a scenic town in the Hunza Valley.
"And if we don`t get anything out of it, our kids will just be collecting the garbage and rubbish from the trucks."
But analysts say the Chinese investment represents a major opportunity to jump-start a Pakistani economy thought to be primed for growth.
With an estimated population of more than 180 million, two-thirds of whom are younger than 30, Pakistan could one day become a top consumer of electronic goods and other costly products, many of them made in China.
Still, Pakistani economists disagree as to whether their country can fully take advantage of the opportunity.
"A long highway passing just through vast land connecting one strategically important point with another, thousands of miles away, will not be an economic corridor," said Sakib Sherani, a prominent Pakistani economist. "But if it also links Pakistani businessmen and traders to markets in China, that would be huge."
To fully reach its economic potential, the country must overcome the threat of Islamist militancy as well as a severe electricity shortage that significantly increases the cost and difficulty of doing business here.
China has promised Pakistan 18 new energy projects, including nine coal-fired power plants, five wind farms, three hydroelectric dams and one solar park. When completed, the projects will add 16,600 megawatts to Pakistan`s national grid, more than offsetting the electricity shortage even with a projected annual growth rate of 7 percent by 2018, said Iqbal, the minister for planning and development.
Terrorism is not so easily addressed, and it`s an issue on both sides of the border. Since becoming China`s president, Xi has been confronted with the domestic threat posed by the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a Muslim separatist group trying to create an independent state in the western part of the country. The group had found havens in Pakistan`s tribal belt and is blamed by China for fomenting violence in the province of Xinjiang.
Ma Jiali, of the Center for Strategic Studies at the China Reform Forum in Beijing, said Pakistani transport routes will allow China to expand its economy in Xinjiang, where violent attacks by ethnic Uighurs have risen sharply in recent years. Such investment could lead to more jobs there, potentially making it more difficult for separatist groups to thrive.
Western analysts also see the potential for China to become the dominant influence in keeping Pakistan focused on its struggle against terrorists.
"For a very long time, people were asking why don`t the Chinese get more engaged with Pakistan" to try to guarantee security, said Vali R. Nasr, dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. "Well, now they have a reason to be. They are putting $46 billion on the table, and they will be looking to protect that $46 billion."
In that way, China is stepping into a void left by the United States when it declined to heavily invest in Pakistan`s infrastructure, despite the strategic alliance between the two countries during the Cold War as well as after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Nasr said.
Over the past 13 years, the United States has given Pakistan about $10.5 billion in economic assistance and $7.6 billion in security-related aid. The U.S. military also reimbursed Pakistan $13 billion in counterterrorism support related to the war in Afghanistan, according to the Congressional Research Service.
The United States "was just not interested in building dams, electrical power plants, railways, roads and bridges, and ports" in Pakistan, Nasr said.
China, by comparison, views its relationship with allies through a prism that is "geopolitical, geo-strategic" but also "geoeconomic," Ma said.
Robert Hathaway, former director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, said that U.S. officials appear content to let China become the dominant influence over Pakistan. But Hathaway said U.S. policymakers are skeptical that China`s $46 billion aid package will ever fully materialize.
A major terrorist attack or Pakistani political crisis could quickly cause the Chinese to reassess their relationship, he said.
"Much of the skepticism reflects the rather dismal American experience in Pakistan over the years," Hathaway said. "You almost never get results commensurate with the effort or money you put into it."
The doubts here are also rooted in history. For too long, some residents say, the northern region`s mineral deposits and timber fields have been looted by businessmen and politicians from the southern part of the country.
"We will not get anything," said Ghulam Hassan, 32, who digs gemstones out of the mountains. "They will just load the gems up in containers and go down to the Arabian Sea, or go take them to China where they will polish, finish them there."
Muhammad Ali, 39, a customs clearing agent in Sost, the northernmost Pakistani city before the Karakorum Highway begins a 35-mile, 7,000-foot ascent to Khunjerab Pass, said foreign investors are the only ones likely to benefit from the project.
But Ali and other residents of the area don`t have to travel far to see some of what China can offer Pakistan.
Within 100 miles of the border, for example, cellphone coverage is sparse. But when motorists reach the top of Khunjerab Pass, 3G service from a Chinese cellular provider bleeds across the frontier.
That`s the sort of modern convenience that Ameer Ullah Baig, a 60-year-old yak farmer who sleeps outside with his herds in the summer, is looking forward to.
Before the original Karakorum Highway opened in the 1970s, Baig said, his family relied on ponies and mules to get around and had to make wool overcoats to stay warm. Now he rides a motorcycle to round up his herd and sleeps in a sub-zero, synthetic sleeping bag that he thinks was made in China.
"The highway was a blessing in disguise," he said. "And I expect the same thing from the economic corridor."
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