China’s growing ambitions in Afghanistan
China’s growing Ambitions in Afghanistan
China recently threw its weight behind the U.S.-Taliban peace agreement signed on February 29 that could end the 18-year war in Afghanistan. Under the peace agreement and secret annexes, the United States military would withdraw its troops from Afghanistan over the next 14 months.
Beijing, which has long been suspicious of the U.S. and NATO military presence in China’s backyard, has supported the ultimate withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan. The Taliban also committed in the deal to preventing “any group or individual, including al-Qaeda, from using the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.” China called on the Taliban and all Afghan parties to seize the opportunity to start intra-Afghan talks in order to achieve lasting peace and stability in Afghanistan.
For several years, China has supported regional diplomatic efforts on the Afghan peace process. Beijing enhanced its diplomatic role at a critical moment when the U.S.-Taliban peace talks abruptly broke down as both sides were close to finalizing a deal in September 2019. President Donald J. Trump canceled U.S. peace talks with the Taliban following a deadly Taliban attack that killed an American soldier. Subsequently, a Taliban delegation travelled to Beijing and met with Deng Xijun, China’s special envoy on Afghanistan, to discuss continuing the negotiations with the United States.
Over the past few years, the Chinese government has hosted numerous visiting Taliban delegations to China, sometimes to the dismay of the Afghan government, in an effort to foster a mutually beneficial relationship. For the Chinese government, the Taliban is a tolerable political player that can assist Chinese authorities in quelling its main security concerns arising from alleged Uyghur militants in Afghanistan.
When the Taliban took power in the late 1990s, according to the former Taliban envoy to Islamabad, Abdul Salam Zaeef, Beijing contacted the Taliban and discussed possible political recognition of the Taliban government if it stopped harboring ethnic Uyghur militants. As long as the Taliban, including its ally al-Qaeda, does not shelter anti-China Uyghur forces or become a proxy of major powers, then Beijing sees the usefulness of maintaining ties with the Taliban, whom China’s ally, Pakistan, supports.
Security and Terrorism Concerns
China’s primary interest in Afghanistan is to prevent the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) from utilizing Afghanistan’s Badakhshan region to launch terror attacks in China or seek to destabilize Xinjiang. The sparsely populated ETIM, which allegedly operated in Afghanistan, later joined Middle Eastern terror groups fighting against the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. Following the fall of the Islamic State and other militant groups in Syria, the Chinese government worried that the Uyghur militant veterans from Syria would return, along with other Islamic State fighters, to Badakhshan mountain areas.
To counter returning ETIM fighters and their possible collaboration with the Islamic State’s branch in Afghanistan, the Islamic State Khurasan Province (ISKP), China set up an anti-terrorism alliance in 2016 with Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan to fight terrorist groups including ETIM. In 2017, Beijing established a trilateral dialogue with Afghanistan and Pakistan to enhance counterterrorism cooperation.
To this end, China has provided assistance to help strengthen Kabul and Dushanbe’s counter-terrorism capacity through the provision of aid, training, and joint anti-terrorism activities. In 2018, media reports suggested that China set up an anti-terror training camp for Afghan troops in the Wakhan Corridor of Badakhshan. To prevent the spillover of terrorism from Afghanistan into China’s western regions via Tajikistan, which shares the Pamir plateau and borderlands with Badakhshan and Xinjiang, China built 11 new border checkpoints and a new military facility along the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border as reported in 2016. By 2019, the presence of the Chinese military base inside Tajikistan bordering Xinjiang and the Wakhan Corridor was revealed in more detail. The United States military, for the first time, deployed B-52 bombers in 2018 to strike alleged ETIM camps in Badakhshan province. The presence of Chinese military installations near the Wakhan corridor and the U.S. military responses under the pretext of countering Uyghur terrorism has made Badakhshan in particular, and Afghanistan more broadly, a focal point in China’s borderland security as well as the United States and China’s respective military strategies on the Pamir plateau.
Economic Engagement
China secondary goal is to incorporate Afghanistan into China’s economic orbit via its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Beijing and Kabul signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on the BRI in 2016. Officially, China has lauded the importance of Afghanistan’s role in its BRI as the landlocked country is strategically located between the China-Central Asia-West Asia Economic Corridor and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and could become an important transportation hub that connects Central Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. Beijing has expressed its desire to extend the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to Afghanistan and will work with Pakistan and Afghanistan to jointly build a highway linking Kabul and Peshawar.
Yet despite such upbeat rhetoric, China-Afghanistan economic relations have paled in comparison to Chinese commercial investments in neighboring borderland countries. Even the once-touted Chinese USD $3 billion mining project at Afghanistan’s largest copper mine at Mes Aynak located in the eastern Logan Province has been repeatedly delayed since the contract was signed in 2007. The Chinese state-owned mining giant Metallurgical Group Corp (MCC) as well as the Kabul government have not received the expected benefits or revenues.
Afghanistan’s myriad of problems including its war-torn economy, local warlords, and systemic government corruption have dashed China’s long-term economic ambitions to secure access to Afghan natural resources and invest in mineral extraction and development. Unlike private commercial actors, China’s state-owned enterprises such as MCC need strong government backing such as in Pakistan. However, the Kabul government is too weak to facilitate Sino-Afghan economic exchanges on a large scale throughout Afghanistan.
Owing to its security and economic interests, China supports the U.S.-Taliban peace deal and any future progress towards intra-Afghan peace talks. From Beijing’s perspective, a unified and strong Afghan government and military can prevent Uyghur militant organizations such as ETIM from launching terrorist acts from Afghanistan’s territory into China. Also, a peaceful and stable Afghanistan would expand China’s BRI regionally and be conducive to deepening bilateral economic cooperation including large-scale infrastructure and mining projects. However, Afghanistan’s diverse geography, existing trading networks focusing on Central and South Asia, and relations with its Western donor governments all make it difficult to form strong economic ties with its eastern neighbor China.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biographies
I-wei Jennifer Chang is a Research Fellow at the Global Taiwan Institute in Washington, D.C. Haiyun Ma is an Associate Professor in History at Frostburg State University and President of the Zhenghe Forum based in Malaysia. Image credit: CC BY-NC 4.0/United Nations/Flickr.