Sitwat Waqar Bukhari
While China has made a number of investments in Afghanistan, including building a base for the Afghan Armed Forces in the northern province of Badakhshan, training Afghan airforce pilots in China and investments in copper mining in areas outside of Kabul, it has largely stayed out of the political turmoil in the war-torn country. To this effect, even though, Afghanistan is portrayed as a central link in China’s One Belt and Road Initiative, and to this date, China is its largest foreign investor, the economic ties between Beijing and Kabul have remained significantly stagnated.
In fact, in 2016, China’s investment in Afghanistan amounted to only $2.2 million and later reduced to merely $400 million in 2017. While in contrast, between 2017-2018, the Chinese investment in Pakistan remained $1.58 billion, soaring to a total investment stock of $5.7 billion at the end of 2017.
China’s concerns in Afghanistan mainly relate to the uncertain security matrix revolving around a prolonged presence of the American troops that in China’s view are doing little to eliminate radicalization and instability. For China, a continued troops presence by the US is America’s way of establishing its foothold in the heart of the Eurasian continent to contain China. By continuing to muddle in the War on Terror against the Taliban insurgents, the United States is fostering radicalization of Muslims in the region and simultaneously contributing to the unrest in China’s northwest Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region rather than effectively resolving the Afghan conflict.
At the same time,China fears that if it makes any large investments in the war-struck country, a chaotic US troops withdrawal would leave behind a potential security vacuum leading to resurgence of even more violence which would endanger the future of any investments. Thus, China’s planning, at this point, depends on how the US makes its exit, if it does so at all. In China’s interests, a continued US troops presence in Afghanistan is not as worse as a withdrawal that has spillover effects of in stability outside Afghanistan.
To help resolve the Afghan conflict, China formally entered the Afghan peace process as a peace negotiator in September 2019. With peace talks on hold at the time between the United States and the Taliban, China convened a Pakistan-Afghanistan-China trilateral dialogue in Beijing as a way to facilitate and expedite there solution of the Afghan conflict. Since then, China has affirmed that, as a friendly neighbor of Afghanistan, it would firmly stand with the Afghan people to contribute to the reconciliation and restoration process in Afghanistan. In October 2019, China organized an intra-Afghan dialogue bringing together warring parties of Afghanistan to Beijing as an attempt to reconcile between them, a process running in parallel to the talks between the Taliban and the United States.
Today, China’s fundamental interest in Afghanistan continue to be achieving internal stability and establishing a functional government as continued Islamic extremism in Afghanistan only threatens the domestic security in China, particularly in Xinjiang. While the US-Taliban peace agreement signed in February 2020 received optimism in the US, China has little confidence in the international Afghan peace process. In China’s view, a US-brokered agreement in Afghanistan would most likely only lead to more instability. In early March 2020, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Zhao Lijian stated that China was willing to “continue to be a supporter, mediator and facilitator of the peace and reconciliation process in Afghanistan,” thus asserting China’s full support to achieving stability in Afghanistan. Zhao Lijian also stated that China wishes for an “orderly and responsible” withdrawal of the US troops so as to avoid leaving behind any chaotic power vacuum that would destabilize the region even more and possibly lead to terrorist resurgence.
What China fears is that, following a US troops withdrawal, the delicate power equilibrium in Afghanistan so far created could potentially be immediately shattered. In the wake, the Taliban may reject the direct peace talks with the Afghan government and there may possibly be a civil war between the Taliban and whatever would remain of the central government. Signs of a shaky intra-Afghan dialogue have already been manifest since the signing of the US-Taliban peace agreement with the Taliban and the Afghan government already disagreeing over the release of the prisoners on both sides. Moreover, the Taliban have continued their military operations against the Afghan government forces. Chinese perception of the US negotiations with the Taliban is clearly not one focused on stabilizing the country but rather mostly another step in irresponsibly rattling the region.
Afghanistan, to date, has largely remained excluded from China’s One Belt and One Road Initiative due to infighting and instability. However, China’s interests in Afghanistan, due to the abundant natural resources present in the country, and as a potential corridor to the Persian Gulf and an overland route to the oil fields of Iran, are not baseless.It appears that the economic giant would more vigorously invest in its stabilization efforts in Afghanistan and build on its development aid, capacity building, diplomacy and military assistance if the United States fully withdraws from Afghanistan. However, it seems unlikely that the US, after its 19-year-long war and the high costs that it has incurred, would remove its presence from such a critical geopolitical location completely. A small military presence would continue to serve the American interests in China’s backyard and may remain a point of contention underlining the instability in the region for decades to come.
Sitwat Waqar Bokhari is a Research Fellow at the Center for Research and Security Studies (CRSS), Islamabad, and Program Manager for its sister organization Afghan Studies Center(ASC). She can be reached on Twitter at @SitwatWB.
