Yesterday and Today The Inner Six and Afghanistan's Six Neighbors.

Byline: Falak Naz

The Inner Six were the six founding member statesBelgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands- of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). It was created by the Treaty of Paris in 1951. The aim was to develop a mechanism to finally put an end to the continent's long history of economic turmoil and bloody warfare. Founded in the aftermath of the Second World War, the ECSC began to unite European nations politically and economically to secure lasting peace. Today, the European integration culminates into the European Union (EU) which governs common political, economic, social, and security policies of the twenty-seven member states.

With the same purpose, the six neighboring countries of Afghanistan are coming together for the peace and development of the entire region They are proactively engaging with Afghanistan. Pakistan, Iran, China, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan aim to develop a unified regional approach. Afghanistan had been facing war and instability for forty years now. The chaos and instability in Afghanistan gave rise to terrorism which affected the peace of the entire Asian region. It also affected the economic prosperity of Afghanistan, and the desire for regional connectivity could never be materialized.

Afghanistan It is located at the crossroads of Central and South Asia, and it also possesses natural resources like iron, copper, lithium, rare earth elements, cobalt, bauxite, mercury, uranium, and chromium. Afghanistan is thought to have so much lithium, an increasingly crucial metal used in battery technology, that it may one day be dubbed the "Saudi Arabia of lithium."

Uzbekistan comprises substantial reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas. Turkmenistan is the seventh-largest natural gas reserve in the world. It is also rich in sulfur, petroleum, sulfur, salt, iodine, cement, bentonite clays, limestone, and gypsum. Tajikistan possesses deposits of gold, silver, lead and zinc, antimony, tin, tungsten, iron, aluminum, strontium, coal, rock salt, phosphorite, and natural gas.

Mineral oil, coal, natural gas, gypsum, iron or chromite, copper, salt, limestone, and marble are extensively found in Pakistan among others. Iran comprises the second-largest stockpile of gas and the fourth largest of oil in the world. And China, the second-biggest economic giant, has a substantial role to play by connecting these countries. Through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Beijing...