What have we done with our strategic assets?
Strategic assets are those that demand attention from the highest levels of the state, and are subject to interstate competition. For the leaders and decision-makers, it is not only important to identify a nation's strategic endowments, but also to manage and use them to further national interests. Of late, discourse on this particular issue has gained traction, definitional vagueness of the term notwithstanding. Such a discourse in Bangladesh, to identify the country's strategic assets, was essential so that the planners, policymakers and leaders could take informed decisions to stave off any extraneous influence on those on the one hand, while on the other, employ their inherent attributes to secure our national interests. Unfortunately, there has been a tendency, a mindset which clouded much of our thoughts, to make light of the geopolitical assets of Bangladesh and consequently minimise the inherent importance of many resources that nature has gifted us with. It had taken a long time to get in to our heads that neither is Bangladesh a basket case, nor does our location in the backwaters of the Bay of Bengal diminish our geopolitical importance. Thus, the general remark that Jeffrey Ding and Allan Dafoe makes in their very interesting article, referring to the world scenario in this regard that, "even as nations are increasingly concerned about strategies to build up technological advantages over their rivals, much more work needs to be done to understand the underlying logic of what makes an asset strategic", could not be more relevant in the case of Bangladesh. And a cursory look at how our strategic assets have been handled will make it amply clear whether our decision-makers have fully comprehended the fundamental rationale of "strategic asset".
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