Magda Lipan*

China has stepped up its efforts to promote and support Taliban which captured Kabul a year ago. On the one hand, it is building a case for international recognition of Taliban and for lifting the travel ban on Taliban leaders. On the other hand, it is engaged in what is no more than business and cultural diplomacy to broaden its footprint on the economically deprived nation of nearly four crore people. 

China Communist Party (CCP)-backed media has gone to the town boasting how the Taliban 2.0 has fairly handled security situation and made efforts to improve the economy in the land locked nation. Also highlighted the contribution of Xi government and Chinese companies in bringing signs of prosperity to the war-ravaged country.

At the vanguard of the ‘Taliban is Good’ campaign is the Global Times (GT), a tabloid from the Communist party stable, which under editor in chief   Hu Xijin adopted the “wolf warrior” communication strategy of loudly denouncing perceived criticism of the Chinese government and its policies.

After a quick short vox pop, GT spread the ‘good word’ that several people across Afghanistan say security situation in the country has improved and violence declined since Taliban seized power.   It, however, conceded rather grudgingly that “tribal culture” still holds great sway in Taliban’s governing style while hastening to add that their administrative capabilities are “comparatively more advanced.”  

The Chinese daily turned to Reto Stocker, who had spent long years as the points man of International Red Cross in Kabul for a ‘positive’ byte. And he obliged with the remark: “An improvement in security (situation) has allowed the Taliban regime to maintain basic functioning (services) of urban life”.  What the GT has left unsaid is that this apparent turn around in security scenario has created ‘space’ for Chinese companies and businessmen to go around on ‘exploration’ even as there is a surge in low-level Chinese trading activity.

About Chinese business forays into Afghanistan a little while later. First the way it is pursuing its near-term goals. Beijing has chosen to keep quite on the rights of ordinary women. It has distanced itself from the campaign of human rights activists against the raw deal Afghan women and school going girls have been getting. It has also not bothered to ask the Taliban as to why they had rolled back their promise of soft version of Islamist rule and why they have made women to comply with the movement’s austere vision of Islam.  

Consider these facts in Afghanistan that stood stir the conscience of anyone certainly a communist leadership wedded to the concept of a welfare state. Tens of thousands of girls are shut out of secondary schools. Women are barred from returning to government jobs. And women are made to fully cover face and head with hijab and wear chadaree (burqa in Pashto) an outer garment covering the body and the face while in public.

For China, frankly from the days of Comrade Mao, these are issues of no concern. The Chinese communist leadership is ideology neutral in their overseas dealings.

And under President Xi, human rights are an issue that is neither here nor there as the plight of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province shows. This region shares with Afghanistan a 74km (46-mile) border along the Wakhan Corridor, extending about 350km from the far northeastern Afghan province of Badakhshan to North-western Chinese province of Xinjiang.

Beijing is not unaware of the bases of Uyghur militants  in Afghanistan under the banner of  East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM). And the patronage they enjoy in the Islamic Republic. These militants have forged linkages with Afghan based militant groups like al-Qaeda, Jamaat Ansarullah, (radical Islamist group linked to al-Qaeda) and the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is Taliban’s closest ally.

This should be a matter of great concern for the Chinese leadership more so, as a UN report noted in July, ETIM has “expanded its area of operations with several strongholds rebuilt in Badakhshan, and covertly purchased weapons, with the aim of improving its capabilities” to strike at Chinese interests.

Like its iron friend, Pakistan, China expected the Taliban to crack down on the ‘bad’ terrorists, and pledged support for the new Kabul leaders. But the Taliban could not afford such crackdown, which could be seen as betrayal by the Uyghur guests, many of whom have acquired local roots.

The Taliban moved some of them away from border regions but haven’t done that much overall; there are in fact questions about how willing they will be since there is a growing perception that Kabul is “keeping ETIM as its trump card”.

These days for militants of all hues in Afghanistan, the Uyghurs including, the Islamic State’s Afghanistan affiliate, Islamic State-Khorasan (Isis-K) has become the new magnet with its high pay outs.  

Some 50 Uygur fighters are said to have already defected to Isis-K.   

Counter terrorism experts estimate the ETIM numbers at about 1,000 fighters in Afghanistan, says a recent report in South China Morning Post. It adds that these numbers may grow as Syria-based Uygur militants will soon return to Afghanistan.

This speculation notwithstanding, the unfolding scenario should be of concern to the Taliban too since ISIS-K is targeting Afghanistan besides China; there are no such signs though.

Interestingly, for reasons still wrapped in the Confucius mystery, Beijing has not made its support to Taliban conditional on a trade-off. 

Instead, China is engaged in pampering the Taliban, which finds itself in a near diplomatic isolation. Its focus is on business with hopes of a better deal on the Uyghur front over time.

It is towards this end that China is walking the extra mile to offer a helping hand to the Taliban regime firstly in the matter of travel ban exemptions for Islamic Emirate leaders, and secondly in grappling with its economic and humanitarian crisis. It has provided eight million US dollars’ worth of assistance to families affected by the recent earthquake, according to Global Times.

Latest media reports from Kabul and Beijing indicate ‘good’ progress on Chinese investments and reconstruction projects.

 Chinese businessmen like Yu Minghui, who have stayed put after the US -led Nato’s withdrawal, have reaped benefits. He has four steel processing lines. The China Town, a 10-storey building is the hub of Chinese business activity.

An industrial estate is coming up in Kabul suburbs as the first Sino-Afghan joint venture at a cost of US$216 million. There is talk of extending China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) into Afghanistan and beyond. China has exempted 98 per cent of its Afghan buys from import duties. China Metallurgical Group will soon start exploration and extraction at the Aynak copper mine. It is the biggest copper mining project in the country.

There is every possibility of all this ending up as a blind investment going by the mercurial nature of the Taliban and Pakistan’s experience with their protégé.

As of now, however, China’s economic footprint is steadily expanding across Afghanistan.

China is also giving a big push to its cultural diplomacy befitting its position as the third largest trading partner of Afghanistan after Pakistan and Iran. It has deputed scholars help protect cultural heritage in Afghanistan.  

China thus far focused on the historical relics at the Mes Aynak copper mine (Logar province) and the Unesco heritage site, Bamyan Valley where the Taliban 1.0 demolished a huge buddha statute.  

According to Peshawar daily, The Frontier Post, Chinese archaeologists have given a fresh lease to the monuments/relics found in the copper mine belt “after scientific research” with a team of Afghan experts.  Maulvi Atiqullah Azizi, Deputy Minister of Culture was impressed by their work. A team of Afghan archaeologists will now travel to China ‘to gain scientific and professional experience’.   

And, in the Bamyan Valley, besides a clean-up, most of the caves have been officially numbered and installed with introduction nameplates, under the guidance of Friends of Dunhuang, a Hong Kong based a non-profit organisation. 

For the uninitiated, Dunhuang, located in an oasis of the Taklamakan Desert in western China, was an important outpost of the Silk Road nearly two thousand years ago. Chinese scholars funded a program to teach local children on ways to preserve cultural heritage. 

This level of interaction at the commercial and cultural level should have normally led to China recognising the Taliban 2.0 in the Kabul seat. But it has not though Chinese diplomats, including ambassador Wang Yu, frequently meet senior Taliban officials.    

Even Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Kabul in March in what was an unannounced stopover during a whirlwind four-day tour of South Asia.  

For the record China has been advocating a multilateral approach to diplomatic engagement with the Taliban and their medieval mindset.   Clearly it is no more than hedging its bets while digging heels into the blood-soaked country even as ‘ETIM time bomb ticking in its neighbourhood’.   

The Chinese could play a role in Afghanistan, but there are several other regional players that are trying to play a role — some of them with China and some of them not. How will China play a major role in Afghanistan remains unanswered.###

—*The writer, a Boston-based consultant is a regular Poreg contributor