P Kharel

Now that the US-led NATO and other forces have virtually left Afghanistan after more than 20 years without a breakthrough, China not only senses but sees the road ahead offering it opportunities for a strong foothold in that strategically important neighbouring country.

What the world at large sees as Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “signature project”, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), will be put forth for speedy pace in the war-torn, landlocked, poverty-stricken South Asian Islamic country.

In July, the Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Bardar led a high-level delegation met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing in an indication that the reemerging power in Afghanistan is keen to woo the neighbouring economic superpower.

Leading NATO members closely watch how Beijing moves and its likely implications for them. This is only to be expected at a time when nearly a quarter century of the US monopoly as a superpower has ended. Not only has Russia reemerged as a superpower but China, too, has found space in the exclusive club, which is cause of immense consternation to Washington and its allies in Europe and the Asia-Pacific in particular.

Wide anticipation

Beijing was keenly awaiting the departure of the foreign troops from its neighbour so that it could step in more prominently to fill the vacuum thus created. Its prime interest is to ensure Kabul’s participation in a proposed $62 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). A major component of BRI, the undertaking was formally incorporated in Chinese Constitution in 2017, four years after its launch. Once US President Joe Biden reiterated the decision to recall American troops from Afghanistan before September 11, things began to move fast. Speculations and calculations circulated briskly. Analyses were churned out as to who would gain and who would lose.

Will the Taliban be back in Kabul’s seat of power? Or will there be a coalition government headed by a Taliban leader?

In July, more than 1,000 Afghan troops fled across the northern border into neighbouring Tajikistan, as they could not withstand the torrent of onslaught by the armed rebels who ruled the country since 1996 until they quit the capital when the NATO-led foreign forces arrived at the gates of the capital in 2001.

Taliban’s first and foremost objective is to hold the reins of power after all these years of fighting against foreign forces from probably the largest number of countries in seven decades. They do not want the country to slide back to civil war of the scale witnessed for the past four decades. The Taliban view Hamid Karzai who served two full terms as executive president or incumbent President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, now serving his second term.

The rulers who operated from Kabul with the arrival of the foreign forces are seen by the rebel groups as nothing more than pawns propped up and protected by foreign powers. The Taliban mood is indicated by the ferocity with which raids were made on government troops and killings done in the past couple of months. An Afghan interpreter for the US Army was beheaded the other week.

In fact, more than 2,000 Afghans, who served the US-led foreign troops as interpreters, had weeks earlier expressed concern over theirs and their families’ safety after the foreign troops withdrew. Most of them are expected to be settled in the US.

Having witnessed the killings of at least 160,000 Afghans and severe setbacks to the economy for a full generation, the Taliban reject the continuation of President Ghani and his team in power. At best the incumbent rulers might be able to extract a pledge for not being hounding and prosecuted for harsh punishments under any new dispensation.

The West’s concern is over a Beijing-supported road project linking Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan. 

This would give a stamp of Afghanistan’s formal participation in CPEC. So far the West had been able to stall Kabul’s positive response to BRI, but conditions in the near future are likely to be more favourable for Beijing.

The objective behind BRI, which target to be completed by 2049, is to connect Asia with Africa and Europe spanning some 60 countries.

The target year marks the completion of 100 years of Communist rule in the world’s most-populous country. The Taliban are likely to respond positively to the project, impressed as they are by Beijing’s offer to fund huge energy projects. In view of the various ethnic divisions in Afghanistan, BRI’s overseas opponents will try persuading some of the groups to oppose the project.

However, the London-based Royal Institute of International Affairs prepared a report in 2020 suggesting that there was no definitive evidence that BRI was a debt-trap initiative.

In July, the main opposition Samoa prevented in the Pacific island’s first female Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa from entering parliament after she vowed to scrap a $100 million port deal with China. Concerned over the growing intensity in big-power rivalry, analysts warn that “extra-territorial” policing constitutes a new form of colonialism. Big powers crave strategic places and natural resources. Where they don’t succeed, they become desperate to ensure that others did not secure it either.

Rivalry soars

It is time that the existing global approach, schemed and defined by the economically and militarily rich, were changed for the larger sake of stability and harmony. The vulnerable among the states risk being squeezed out of the natural resources that belong to them. They might not forget that the 19th century English author Rudyard Kipling spoke of the “white man’s burden” of civilising “barbarians”, whose number was stupendously larger than the minuscule number that set out to invade and rule various parts of the world whose local populations were not granted as much rights as the citizens of the “mother” country.

An indication of how power equations change gradually is echoed by Washington’s complaint that “North Korea ‘not responding’ to US contact efforts,” The Joe Biden administration’s efforts to contact the government in Pyongyang since February is yet to succeed even after six months. Various Afghan political groups, too, have carefully followed the existing struggle between the major powers.

Now controlling 85 per cent of Afghan territory and buoyed by the withdrawal of foreign troops, the Taliban, led by Mawlawi Hibatullah Akhundzada since 2016, think they are within a striking distance of returning to power. And they may not be off the mark.

(Professor Kharel specialises in political communication.)