Afghanistan: Taliban find a partner in China
Beijing has spotted an opportunity in the U.S.’s abandonment of Afghanistan to de facto Taliban control, said Stephanie Findlay in the Financial Times (U.K.). American and NATO troops will be gone within a month, and various factions in the war-torn country—the Taliban, the Afghan government, and the northern warlords—are all tussling for power. But the Taliban, who already control more than half of Afghanistan’s districts, are ascendant; U.S. analysts believe they will take over Kabul within six months. China is preparing for such a future and “may become the next superpower to try to write a chapter in Afghanistan’s history.” China and Afghanistan share only a small border, but that 56-mile frontier runs along the western edge of Xinjiang province, home to China’s Muslim Uighur minority. Beijing’s key foreign policy goal in Afghanistan is to ensure that the Taliban don’t take up the cause of the Uighurs, whose culture Beijing is trying to obliterate through mass concentration camps and forced sterilization. Beijing is now offering “to rebuild Afghanistan’s shattered infrastructure,” and in return the Taliban have pledged not to host Uighur separatist fighters, as they did in years past.
It’s in Beijing’s interest to ensure a stable and prosperous Afghanistan, said Kinling Lo in the South China Morning Post (China). China is investing some $60 billion in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which will connect Xinjiang to Pakistan’s Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea through a network of roads, railways, and pipelines. An unstable Afghanistan would jeopardize that “flagship project.” Beijing is also eying Afghanistan’s mineral wealth. The country has an estimated $1 trillion worth of untapped copper, iron, cobalt, mercury, gold, and lithium reserves, as well as valuable coal and gas fields. Some Chinese argue that we should shun the Taliban, calling them “an enemy of China’s national interest,” said Hu Xijin in the Global Times (China). “Such a claim is emotional, naïve, and deeply out of place.” We cannot “interfere in Afghanistan’s internal affairs” by supporting or opposing one faction. If the Taliban take charge, we will work with them. Only last week, Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen said the group regards China as a “welcome friend” and hopes to talk to Beijing about investments “as soon as possible.”
Is the West just going to let China “inveigle its way in to fill the void left by the U.S.”? asked The Australian (Australia) in an editorial. China already has far too much influence over “enormously indebted neighboring Pakistan”—Prime Minister Imran Khan, who routinely calls for action against Islamophobia, recently said he accepts Beijing’s line that Muslims are not being brutalized in Xinjiang. If China also gains control of Afghanistan, it will upset the entire power balance in South Asia, which is currently dominated by democratic India. The West might think that bringing the troops home will “draw a line under the unwanted ‘forever war’ in Afghanistan.” China’s “cynical attempt to cozy up to the Taliban for the sake of gaining strategic advantage” suggests otherwise.