He large sums war into and other n Afghanimoney would Continued ‘ proxy war’

After announcing the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, the Biden administration is also fretting about whether Pakistan, Russia, China, India, and Turkey will do more in Afghanistan, fearing that other countries may fill the void left by the withdrawal of the US, according to Russian media outlets.

“We have to shore up American competitiveness to meet the stiff competition we're facing from an increasingly assertive China,” Biden said.

Niu Xinchun, director of the Institute of Middle East Studies at China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, wrote in an article the main purpose of US public opinion to play up the US' withdrawal is for the country to concentrate energy to deal with China, and it is

to find an

“excuse” for the US' embarrassing withdrawal.

For some time, the US military presence in Afghanistan has been described by some international observers as a “flimsy.” However, Zhu Yongbiao from the Center for Afghanistan Studies in Lanzhou University told the Global Times that, objectively speaking, the US has gained enormous benefits from the 20- year war in Afghanistan - not only through the anti- terrorism alliance to maintain the hegemony of the US system, but also expand the US overseas garrison to the central and western regions in Asia, Many new weapons and strategic and tactical methods were tested in Afghanistan.

He believed that the

US has strengthened its strategic threat to China, Russia, Iran, and other countries through the war in Afghanistan, which has contained or consumed the strategic resources of relevant countries.

Zhu believed that after the withdrawal of the US, Afghanistan may be dragged into the stage of a “proxy war,” and even regional powers such as India and Pakistan will increase support for the proxy in explicit or implicit ways. At the same time, extremist and drug- related forces will seek a safe haven in Afghanistan. He said that the complete withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan will also embolden extremist terrorist forces around the world. Some analysts said that if the situation in Afghanistan is unstable in the future, the negative impact on China's western border region will be long

term and complex.

IC Photos: Above: An Afghan police officer keeps watch at the site of a bomb blast in Kabul, Afghanistan on January 10, 2021. Left: A woman observes the scene of an attack a day after a car bomb went off in Herat, Afghanistan, March 13, 2021.