Often hailed by Chinese and Pakistani analysts as a “game-changer,” the multibillion-dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) gained fresh strategic significance recently with Beijing brokering a rapprochement between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

At a trilateral meeting in Beijing on May 21, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi and Acting Foreign Minister of Afghanistan Amir Khan Muttaqi “agreed to deepen Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) cooperation and extend the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to Afghanistan.” The meeting also saw Wang broker the first ambassadorial exchange between Kabul and Islamabad since 2021.

Economic initiatives are embedded in geopolitical realms, with CPEC a blueprint for stability in South Asia. This article examines why the May 2025 breakthrough matters amid hybrid-warfare threats, how peace fuels prosperity, whether CPEC’s Afghan extension could work and how the corridor could reshape South Asia.

Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest and resource-rich but marginalized province bordering Iran and Afghanistan, hosts Gwadar Port, the gateway to CPEC. As a potential trade hub linking Asia to global markets, it is also a flashpoint for rivalries that fuel regional instability.

Balochistan’s $1 trillion mineral wealth contrasts with the poverty and unemployment of its people and the poor healthcare and low school enrollment in the province. This has fueled unrest. Decades of inequitable extraction have deepened alienation, pushing some toward separatism. “Our access to the sea has been blocked,” Jamal Peer Bakhsh, a Baloch fisherman from Gwadar, revealed to this writer. Since the port and East Bay Expressway were built, fishermen have to make costly and longer trips into the sea. The government “has failed to create large-scale jobs under CPEC” to protect fishermen’s rights, he said.

A Gwadar-based analyst told this writer that worsening security risks are already disrupting port operations,........

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