China also has to deal with the crisis in Afghanistan – Pierre Haski

China is often referred to as a “revisionist” power: not in the sense of the term in vogue at the time of Mao, with a return to the bourgeois order, but in the strategic sense, that is, as a power that wants to change the dominated established order from its rivals. Sometimes, however, even Beijing welcomes with concern changes that risk being unfavorable to it.

Afghanistan represents one of these cases. China has regularly criticized the US and NATO presence in Afghanistan, but today it worries about the hasty American military withdrawal and the risk of destabilization in a country with which it has a common border, albeit just 76 kilometers long and located at over four thousand meters above sea level. The border, however, connects Afghanistan to the Chinese province of Xinjiang, already at the center of attention for the “Uyghur question”.

Concern increased on July 14, with the attack that killed nine Chinese engineers on a bus ride in northeastern Pakistan. Engineers were on their way to the construction site of the Dasu hydroelectric project, built by a Chinese company in the Khyber Paktunkhwa province on the border with Afghanistan. The attack, which Pakistanis initially tried to pass as the consequence of a malfunction, has not been claimed, but analysts in Islamabad indicate two possible “suspects”: an armed group of Pakistani Baluchistan (which has already attacked in the past Chinese interests) or the Pakistani Taliban, Pashtun jihadists like their Afghan colleagues.

Reactions heated
Regardless of the identity of those responsible, the moment chosen to strike a Chinese target feeds fears in Beijing, while in Afghanistan the situation deteriorates. The Afghan Taliban in fact went on the offensive at the same time as the departure of the last US troops, conquering a large number of districts and settling on the country’s borders with several neighboring states: Tajikistan, Iran and of course Pakistan, which supports them under the scrutiny. for years.

Reactions in Beijing have been very heated. The radically nationalist Communist Party newspaper Global Times called for reprisals: “China must act to demonstrate to the anti-government forces in Pakistan that despite the distance of thousands of kilometers anyone carrying out terrorist attacks against our compatriots is bound to pay. Whatever the perpetrators of the attacks on Chinese personnel and projects, they constitute themselves as enemies of China by their actions. China will firmly support the Pakistani government’s efforts to exterminate them ”.

It is a strong and threatening reaction, which nevertheless betrays a certain nervousness. But there are other reasons for concern. In fact, some reports refer to the presence on the side of the Afghan Taliban of various fighters of the Etym, the Islamic Movement of East Turkestan (the name given by Uyghur nationalists to their region, which the Chinese call Xinjiang). Etym is linked to al Qaeda, and this closeness between the Taliban and Uyghur jihadists fuels Beijing’s anxiety considering that the Islamists are likely to control the Afghan-Chinese border soon.

This context explains the statement by the head of Chinese diplomacy Wang Yi, who meeting his Afghan colleague called for an “inclusive” political solution that prevents Afghanistan from becoming a “hotbed of terrorist forces”. These are words very similar to those of the Americans. Beijing has often criticized the United States for abandoning Afghanistan before finding a stable solution for the country’s future, and in the meantime it has continued its parallel diplomacy with the Taliban in hopes of building a pragmatic relationship that overcomes differences. ideological.

Three goals at risk
China, therefore, is in the paradoxical situation of having to worry about the withdrawal of American troops at its borders and the arrival of a “revolutionary” force on its doorstep. It must be said that in recent years, while NATO guaranteed (for better or worse) security, China was investing in Afghanistan, especially in a mining sector with vast potential. Beijing finds itself with three objectives suddenly at risk: securing investments in Afghanistan, avoiding a security threat in the direction of Xinjiang and consolidating its alliance with Pakistan, where over 50 billion dollars have been invested in the framework of the “corridor economic Sino-Pakistani “.

In this context, China can count on an “instrument”: the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a structure created twenty years ago together with Russia with the initial aim of stabilizing the Central Asian region located between the two countries. Since then the SCO has evolved, opening up to other countries in the region (as participants or observers) including Pakistan, India and Iran, Afghanistan’s other neighbor. The SCO has just organized a summit in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, focused on Afghanistan.

This sort of “little NATO” is controlled more and more by Beijing and less and less by Moscow, and could play an important role in securing this particularly unstable region located on the border with China. Beijing must tackle these problems while always being careful not to find itself mired in the Afghan chaos, which over the last century has exhausted the British Empire, the Soviet Union and the United States. But on the other hand, this is the price to pay for becoming a superpower.

Translation by Andrea Sparacino