Asian Highway Network
A report in your daily of 12.10.08 indicates that Bangladesh is in danger of missing the right to join the Asian Highway Network (AHN) due to its inability so far to meet the deadline for signing the AHN Agreement. A direct access to this 1,41, 000 Km long transport artery across Asia up to Europe and the wide network of roads coupled to it, without the slightest doubt, is of great importance for trade, commerce and tourism in Bangladesh, no less than that of all the participating countries and beyond. Although Bangladesh by historical inheritance was one of the founding members of the Asian Highway Network, it has lost that status in the meantime by failing to sign up in 2005, and now it has a mere observer status. Bangladesh will be a total outsider if it fails to sign up the Agreement this time as well.
One reason for the past failure is apparently an utterly wrong strategy to achieve its goal of a route that connects Bangladesh to both India and Myanmar (and from there on to Thailand), rather than from and to India. This failed strategy of the negotiators of the Ministry of Communications is due at least in part to the mix-up of the maximal goal with the so-called "transit syndrome", that has more to do with mutual mistrust than with enlightened self-interest, on both sides. What the negotiators must now recall is that in international negotiations, not the maximal desirable goal but the maximum achievable goal that determines the substance at a given point in time, and that achieving the latter depends on the negotiating skill and clout of the negotiator.
We know what the maximal goal is, a route through Bangladesh connecting directly to Myanmar. Pursuing this maximal goal last time naively (without the required support of at least two sponsors from the member countries) the negotiators of the communication ministry have not only not reached the maximal goal, but also have managed to lose the status of a member-country for Bangladesh -- which has greatly diminished its clout it otherwise had as a member-negotiator.
The government must not miss the impending deadline, and at this critical point in time adopt a strategy to ensure its own minimal vital interest by signing the AHN Agreement, first, and continue to lobby and negotiate as a member-country toward its maximal goal, next, -- not the other way around. The government ought to act quickly and decisively, knowing that self-inflicted injury is what the country can ill afford now, or its consequences in the future.
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