Afghanistan: China’s neighbour from hell

It is twenty years since John Simpson famously walked into a deserted Kabul and liberated the city on behalf of the BBC. That gesture epitomised the climate of delusion that prevailed at the height of the neo-con crusade to remake the world. The invaders made no bones about the fact they had come not simply to expel terrorist networks, but to change the culture of Afghanistan.

Give it six months, was the consensus, and this city will be bristling with satellite dishes, like a trailer park in Mississippi, and once the youngsters get hooked on MTV they will soon forget all that religion stuff. After all, it had worked in America and much of the developed world, so why not in this country? Part of the negative answer lay in the fact that Afghanistan is not a country, but a cauldron of contiguous tribes. Despite loitering there for twenty years, America never understood Afghanistan.

The United States should have left, at the latest, immediately after the killing of Osama bin Laden, when “Mission accomplished” would have had some resonance of credibility. Instead, the Americans bumbled on, still vestigially engaged in the doomed neo-con enterprise of “nation building”.

Donald Trump correctly recognised their time was up, but he conceded far too much in negotiations with the Taliban. Yet even that unsatisfactory agreement was predicated on an orderly withdrawal. If the most powerful nation on earth (until last Sunday) cannot extricate itself from defeat in a disciplined fashion, the world will discount it from geopolitical calculations.

On Sunday, 15 August, 2021, at 5.40pm, it was reported: “The US Ambassador has left the embassy and taken the flag.” Sorry, which flag? On 2 June, the US Embassy Kabul tweeted a picture of a rainbow flag flying, with the message: “The month of June is recognized as (LGBTI) Pride Month. The United States respects the dignity & equality of LGBTI people & celebrates their contributions to the society.”

That is how extravagantly the madness had progressed, as a new layer of woke insensitivity was laid on top of the crumbled neo-con project. Kabul is the capital of a society so socially conservative it makes Riyadh look like Greenwich Village, and an occupying power that supposedly aspires to win hearts and minds is flying a rainbow flag over it. Could the Taliban propagandists, urging Afghan military units to desert or surrender, have asked for anything more helpful? The woke fanaticism of the Democrats is alienating conservative opinion around the globe.

The United States spent $83bn of American taxpayers’ money on arming and training the Afghan Army. That materiel has now fallen into the hands of the Taliban, making it one of the best armed forces in the world. America is a global laughing stock. And leading the laughter is the ominously rising superpower that will now displace the United States in that sphere of geopolitical influence.

The editor of the Beijing-controlled Global Times mockingly tweeted: “After the fall of the Kabul regime, the Taiwan authorities must be trembling. Don’t look forward to the US to protect them. Taipei officials need to quietly mail-order a Five-Star Red Flag from the Chinese mainland. It will be useful one day when they surrender to the PLA.”

Welcome to Realpolitik, Joe Biden-style. Much of a nation’s prestige depends on perception and political will, rather than military hardware. The Soviet Union had sufficient nuclear firepower to destroy the planet, but it still imploded. The Afghan debacle has dangerously fuelled Beijing’s ambitions to succeed America as the leading global superpower.

In the post-American order in Afghanistan and the surrounding nations, China is a principal player. But its reaction to the situation must be ambiguous. On the one hand, it will be glad to have the armed forces of its main opponent leave a country with which it shares a border. Yet, at the same time, the American occupation was in some respects useful to Beijing. It meant that America suffered the opprobrium of invasion and occupation, while suppressing a variety of jihadist organisations threatening to China’s security interests in neighbouring Xinjiang province.

China’s investment in Afghanistan at one time looked ambitious. Since 2007 it has leased the Aynak Copper Mine, one of the largest untapped deposits of copper in the world, situated 25 miles southwest of Kabul, from the Afghan government, for $3.5bn. There were predictions that investment could increase to nearly $10bn if China were to build a power plant and railway to service the mine, but that has not happened and the whole project is in limbo.

Though widely perceived as an impoverished desert, Afghanistan is extremely rich in minerals, with deposits amounting to a possible value of $3 trillion. One of the disastrous consequences of America’s undignified ejection from Afghanistan is that it has lost potential access to rare Earth materials vital in providing components for electronic devices and advanced weaponry, for which China will now remain its chief supplier, a strategically undesirable dependency.

The Taliban leadership will not be indifferent to this potential source of revenue: as long ago as 2016 it publicly expressed approval of China’s mining proposals and pledged not to attack installations. But China is deeply distrustful of the long-term security situation in Afghanistan, and rightly so.

For years now, the Taliban and Beijing have been exchanging honeyed words. Beijing has now hailed the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul as “the choice and will of the Afghan people”, which is not a completely false analysis, considering the widespread support the Taliban enjoys in rural areas and the immeasurable corruption of the Kabul government, which left its troops unpaid and deprived of ammunition, and consequently unwilling to resist the Taliban.

Beijing has no option but to flatter the new regime, even if it privately considers a jihadist-ruled Afghanistan as the neighbour from hell. That caution is reflected in its direct foreign investment into Afghanistan which last year totalled $4.4m, compared with $110m into Pakistan. It is Pakistan, a close ally of Beijing, that has been the supposed beneficiary of CPEC, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the flagship enterprise of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. However, the project has progressed unsatisfactorily for China, apart from gaining access to the port of Gwadar, and has crippled Pakistan with debt.

The problem for Beijing is that every initiative – infrastructural, economic, diplomatic – is overshadowed by the elephant in the room: China’s treatment of the Uighur Muslim population in Xinjiang. The CPEC work in Pakistan has been subjected to terrorist attacks: last month a suicide car bomber destroyed a bus in north Pakistan, killing 13 people, including nine Chinese engineers. That is the kind of incident that seriously alarms Beijing.

In fact, considering the competing terrorist organisations housed in Afghanistan and the imprisonment of a million Uighur Muslims in concentration camps just over the border, it is arguably remarkable how few attacks there have been. The internal workings of jihadist groups are largely obscure, but in 2017 the Uighur issue seemed temporarily to rise up the international jihadist agenda. ISIS was ideologically the most pro-Uighur faction and in 2017 published a video in which Uighur fighters vowed to return to Xinjiang and “shed blood like rivers”. But the sabre-rattling died down almost immediately.

Uighur fighters have served under both ISIS and al-Qaeda in Syria, where some participated in atrocities against Christians, which might lessen sympathy for them in the West. However, their numbers do not appear to have been high and the majority showed little inclination to return to Xinjiang. Now, though, with Assad victorious in Syria and the Taliban back in Kabul, Afghanistan might seem an attractive base from which to direct jihad against China.

Then there are the internal divisions within the Taliban, between the military and political leadership, and between the recently Quetta-based main command and dissident northern elements. The emergence of winners and losers in the allocation of government positions is likely to provoke further disharmony. So, even if it was sincere in its professions, the Taliban leadership almost certainly cannot deliver on its pledge not to attack China, with restless fighters looking for a new enemy and rival militias such as ISIS and al-Qaeda on the periphery.

The question remains: why did the apparent unity among all factions, against China, in 2017 fizzle out? Possibly a desire to finish with America first. The notion that ISIS was fading away has not been borne out. It appears still to command 10,000 fighters and the UN Security Council last month estimated its resources at between $25m and $50m. ETIM, the Uighur separatist and jihadist group, appears to be small. The problem, however, with jihadist organisations is that they can expand and contract with bewildering rapidity.

The most menacing feature of ETIM is that, due to Chinese government policy which initially exaggerated the Uighur threat in order to justify repressive measures, there must now be a vast number of potential recruits in Xinjiang, just over the Afghan border. This has been described by one analyst as a self-fulfilling prophecy. An insurgency on any scale would be a major disruption of China’s security, economic aims and international image that it will be anxious to avoid at any cost. Tweeting taunts at a humiliated United States may be good fun for Chinese polemicists, but the latest development on the other side of China’s western frontier is no laughing matter for Beijing.