China and the Taliban Move to a Marriage of Convenience: Experts
After the Taliban took over Kabul on Aug. 15, both the Chinese regime and the Taliban have said that they look forward to friendship with each other. The Chinese however have come short of recognizing the Taliban as the legitimate rulers, whereas the Taliban have said that China can contribute to Afghanistan’s development.
While reports continue to come of Taliban conducting door-to-door searches and killing people including journalists and women, the Taliban spokesperson has been giving interviews offering amnesty, women’s rights, and media freedom. The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying in a press conference on Aug. 19 seemed to support the Taliban narrative, saying that the “Afghan Taliban will not repeat the history of the past and now they are more clear-eyed and rational.”
A source has confirmed for The Epoch Times that the Taliban since its takeover has been conducting door-to-door searches for intellectuals and journalists.
Days before the Taliban took over the capital, an Epoch Times Kabul-based source said, on condition of anonymity, that in the month of June alone, 51 targeted killings by “unknown men” were reported around the country.
The Taliban hasn’t been taking credit for most of the targeted killings, which are of civilians, since the U.S.–Taliban peace deal was signed in February 2020. The deal limits the kind of attacks the terrorists can conduct, and the Taliban strategy of not taking credit for the assassinations is linked to the peace-talk diplomacy, according to a report in January by Gandhara.
In any case, reports of Taliban violence have not deterred the prospects for China working with the Taliban. Experts said the Chinese have intensified contact with the Taliban after Aug. 15 and preparations are in full swing for a marriage of convenience.
“It’s providing international support to the Taliban and possibly intelligence and logistics support against the United States. By doing so it wants to further humiliate the United States and contribute to its decline in the region,” said Srikanth Kondapalli, Professor in Chinese Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
“In the short term, China is likely to provide all support to the Taliban to overrun Afghanistan and form a stable government,” he said. China is in touch with the Taliban through its own military links but also through Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), he said.
On Aug. 18, China’s Foreign Ministry stated it had not yet officially recognized the Taliban as ruling Afghanistan, and that recognition would come after a government is formed.
History of CCP-Taliban Friendship
The relationship between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Taliban can be traced back to the 1970s when the Chinese military intelligence trained the mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, said Kondapalli.
“According to Gen Xiong Guangkai (ex PLA Deputy Chief of General Staff), hundreds of Chinese trainers provided training, arms—AK 47s and Red Arrow missiles—to the mujahideen in Xinjiang and other contiguous areas in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the post-Soviet years, China consolidated its relations with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, specifically with the Hekmatyar group prior to the 911 events,” he said.
Reports of contacts ran deeper as China paid the Taliban for the captured, unexploded, and even the detonated U.S. arms. An October 2001 Guardian report claimed that China paid bin Laden several million dollars to access an unexploded American cruise missile.
About a year before, at the end of 2000, the UN Security Council had proposed sanctions on the Taliban to force it to close bin Laden’s terrorist training camps located on its territory, but the PRC abstained from the vote. Instead, it sent military personnel to support the Taliban immediately after the United States began airstrikes in Afghanistan, according to The Epoch Times book, “How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World.”
“China’s ambassador to Pakistan engaged [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar with the proposal not to aid the Uyghurs in lieu of protection at UNSC [UN Security Council] for the Taliban. Post 911, China continued its links with the Taliban and its supporter the ISI of Pakistan and articulated the view that Kabul government should be broad-based [meaning the Taliban should be given positions in the government],” said Kondapalli.
Additionally, in 2004, Chinese intelligence agencies had used shell companies in financial markets around the world to help bin Laden raise funds and launder money, according to a report http://www.asianresearch.org/articles/2733.htm l" target="_blank" rel="noopener">published in Association for Asia Research.
Responding to questions about media reports on China’s close contacts with the Taliban, the Chinese spokesperson denied them in a press conference in August 2001.
However, China’s interest in Afghanistan has long been known. A paper by Kenneth Katzman and Clayton Thomas published by the Congressional Research Service in 2017, lists three Chinese interests in Afghanistan. (pdf)
“China’s involvement in Afghanistan has been primarily to secure access to Afghan minerals and other resources; to help its ally Pakistan avoid encirclement by India; and to reduce the Islamist militant threat to China itself,” said Katzman and Thomas.
Even though China says that it doesn’t want to be involved in the internal matters of other countries, the CCP regime had been “creating a wedge” between the Kabul government and the Taliban.
“In the last decade, China prepared the ground for Taliban resurgence through individual contacts, UN interventions, multilateral support through Istanbul process, Doha meetings, inviting Taliban to Beijing, Urumqi and Xian, a quadrilateral with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tajikistan or others,” he said.
Brent E. Huffman, the director of “Saving Mes Aynak,” a widely-acclaimed documentary on a 5000-year-old Buddhist site near Kabul that sits on a copper mine that the China has long been interested in told The Epoch Times that visit of high-ranking Taliban leaders to Beijing on invitation started almost a decade back.
“The Chinese state-owned mining Company MCC bought the mining rights to $100 billion at Mes Aynak, Afghanistan in 2007 located in Logar Province in an area close to Taliban strongholds. In the past, the Taliban have attacked Mes Aynak with rockets and landmines and in 2018 an Afghan archaeologist was killed when his vehicle hit a landmine when he arrived at the site,” said Huffman. The Afghan archeologists working at the site were constantly threatened by the Taliban, he said, and now after Aug. 15 they fear for their lives.
“China hopes to partner with the Taliban to mine at Mes Aynak without restrictions related to protecting the environment, human rights, and cultural heritage,” he said.
Chunying in a regular press conference on Aug. 17, said that the CCP “maintained contact and communication with the Afghan Taliban on the basis of fully respecting Afghanistan’s sovereignty and the will of all factions in the country, and played a constructive role in promoting the political settlement of the Afghan issue.”
Future for CCP-Taliban Relations
Frank Lehberger, a Sinologist and a senior research fellow with India-based Usanas Foundation, told The Epoch Times in an email that the Afghan Taliban and the CCP’s relationship will be like a marriage of convenience, but the CCP will try to portray it as a close strategic partnership.
“The CCP needs a relatively stable Afghanistan for its BRI [Belt and Road Initiative] plans. The Taliban could deliver this if they will not engage in a protracted civil war inside Afghanistan with genocidal acts against Shiite or Turkmen minorities, all of which would draw in armed intervention by the Turks or the Iranians,” said Germany-based Lehberger.
“And if the Taliban do not follow their expansive reflexes in trying to grab land or wholesale destabilize neighboring pro-Moscow regimes in Central Asia (Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, etc)….which would provoke Putin,” he said. There are scenarios where the Taliban would be bending over backward to accommodate the wishes of the CCP, he said.
“As long as the CCP leadership quickly pays the amounts of foreign currencies or provides all the infrastructure investments that the Afghanistan-Taliban want, and as long as the CCP does not obstruct the now growing export trade of illicit narcotics from Taliban controlled Afghanistan to Europe (which benefits the Afghanistan-Taliban and helps weaken the so-called infidels in Europe), then the Taliban will be ‘nice’ to China,” he said.
In this scenario, the Taliban will ignore how the CCP treats Muslims inside China and will chase away the remaining Uyghur or other Muslim separatists within Afghanistan’s territory and on its borders near the Wakhan corridor that borders Xinjiang Province in China, according to Lehberger.
“But if the CCP is unwilling or unable to provide the expected finances in time, or if China does anything that does not please the Taliban, then the Taliban will very fast bite the Chinese hands that feed them,” he said.
Ahmad Rashid Salim, a best-selling author, community leader, and academic who researches and teaches on topics in the fields of Islamic studies, Farsi literature, and Afghanistan in California told The Epoch Times over the phone that China’s announcement that it’ll work with the Taliban should alarm the world.
“China is known for its repressive system and human rights abuses—recently related to the encampment, torture, and disappearance of Uyghur Muslims and erasure of their culture and heritage,” said Salim, adding that China wants to capitalize on Afghanistan’s natural resources.
“As long as the ruling regime allows for Chinese companies to exploit the resources, China does not care what they do to the population or how oppressive their rule is.”
Huffman said that when China begins to dig under the Taliban’s protection at the open-pit copper mine in Mes Aynak, it’ll destroy a priceless world heritage forever.
The worth of Afghanistan’s mineral resources is estimated at $1 trillion including the rare earth minerals whose supply chains China predominates.
