Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi greets Chinese FM Wang Yi (Photo: AFP/Taliban Foreign Ministry)
Péter Wagner
19/02/2024 20:49
There were many arguments in favour of China taking over the US role in Afghanistan. For example, Beijing has made significant investments in the region over the past decade as part of the Belt and Road Initiative. In addition, the country is extremely rich in raw materials, which China may also need, but the civil war has made exploration unfeasible. Moreover, there was no need to "start from scratch": Beijing has sought a balanced relationship with Afghanistan, whether with the former Taliban regime before 2001 or the US-backed Afghan Republic from 2001-2021. Like other major powers in the world, from the mid-2010s the Chinese began direct negotiations with the Taliban resistance movement, both to avoid being left to run after events and to pursue their security interests in Afghanistan after a possible takeover.
What are these security interests? In Chinese terminology, the "three evils" - separatism, terrorism and religious extremism - in practice mean the various Uighur groups that have been present in Afghanistan since the 1990s. The most important of these is the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which carries out terrorist attacks against Chinese targets in the name of the ten million Uighur minority living in China. The group has been integrated and deployed by the Islamic State in Afghanistan; in December 2022, for example, its terrorists targeted a hotel in Kabul popular with Chinese, and five Chinese were wounded in the attack. The perpetrators later threatened China in a video message that they would target both its citizens and various Belt and Road projects. As the Taliban have been fighting the Islamic State since the beginning, and there is a commonality of interest between the two sides, the fight against terrorism and the protection of Chinese citizens working in Afghanistan has become a key issue.
China is one of the few countries that has not closed its embassy after the Taliban takeover, and the Chinese ambassador in Kabul is in regular contact with the new government. As an indication of their increasing activity, in early 2023 a Chinese oil company signed an agreement with the Taliban to explore an oil field in northern Afghanistan worth around USD 500 million. Significantly, the same project was agreed in 2021, but Beijing felt the need to reach a deal with the new leadership. It is important to note here that China has not officially recognised the Taliban's rule either, raising the question of what legal guarantees investments enjoy in a country with which it has no formal diplomatic relations.
The seriousness of the intentions, however, is demonstrated by the historic summit between Pakistan, China and Afghanistan in Islamabad in May 2023. The main theme was how to link the Central Asian country to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a Chinese investment programme worth more than 50 billion dollars launched ten years ago. The agreement between the three countries has effectively formalised what seems obvious on the face of the map: it is in China's interest to link the Belt and Road projects that have bypassed Afghanistan, making it easier to expand its influence and reduce the role of the US.
The author is a lecturer at the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church