Dr. Fatemeh Mahrough

Translated by: Majed Kiasat

Sino-Afghan relations have gone through many ups and downs since the beginning of official relations in 1955. Despite the shortest joint border length (76 km), managing these relations has always been one of China's most important and challenging foreign policies due to the complexity of Afghanistan's political geography. 

The transformation of this country into a scene of action for major world and regional powers and strategic rivalries between them, along with the activities of approximately 20 takfiri groups and extremist and militant currents inside Afghanistan, has added to the complexity of the issue. Accordingly, both the US entry into Afghanistan to confront the Taliban and the US sudden withdrawal from the country have always been controversial and have overshadowed the stability and security of the region and Afghanistan's neighbors, especially China, Iran and Russia. The main strategic reason for the US withdrawal from Afghanistan is to change the geography of confrontation from this region to Asia-Pacific to face China's emerging power. According to the Biden administration's National Security Strategy Guide, China is the only potential competitor that can use the various dimensions of economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power as a sustainable and systemic challenge to the US-led international order. According to the analysis of available data, China's GDP by the end of 2021 will reach about 71% of US GDP. Whereas Soviet GDP in the 1980s, during the Cold War, was less than 50% of US GDP. Accordingly, the United States, which once saw Afghanistan at the heart of the China-Russia-Iran triangle, saw its continued presence in the country as an opportunity to strategically control them as a strategic rival or enemy. Now, after 20 years of military presence and increasingly fruitless spending in Afghanistan, the United States has changed its strategy so that American hegemony does not diminish further as it gets caught in the swamp of Afghanistan. In this way, the concentration of all national security institutions, assets and forces that have been used in Afghanistan so far will be sent to the Indo-Pacific region to confront China. As a result, the United States now sees Afghanistan as only part of its global strategy, and Afghanistan will no longer be a US priority. The United States has concluded that the resumption of civil war in Afghanistan or even the fall of the Afghan government will not affect US national security.However, Afghanistan remains part of the Asian chessboard, a region where the United States is strategically competing with China. However, with the sudden exit and escalation of security crises in the region, the United States seeks to destabilize China's periphery and trap it on various fronts to curb China's development.The most important consequence of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan for China will be the creation of security crises and political instability in the region.
Following the 9/11 attacks and the US decision to intervene militarily in Afghanistan, China's policy was based on three pillars:
Identify the US withdrawal as a strategic threat to China's national security
Curbing the growth and expansion of Uighur militants in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region
Establish stability for the development of a new Silk Road development plan.
In practice, the US military presence and the international coalition had become an effective factor in curbing the activities of extremists and terrorist groups. In this way, it was possible for China to achieve economic development and promotion without paying a significant price It seems that the most important strategy and policy of China after the irresponsible withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan is to confront the Uighur militias to prevent the spread of insecurity and political instability in Afghanistan and its adverse impact on China's national security. In this way, by using a combination of solutions and political-economic interactions, China will seek to maintain its influence in the region and deal pragmatically with the parties involved in Afghanistan. First, China's main concern is the impact of insecurity and extremist movements on China's Xinjiang region. As a result, China's most important request to the Taliban is not to support East Turkestan / Uyghur militant groups. The challenge facing China in achieving this goal is that it does not face a uniform and cohesive Taliban, and in fact the dominant and powerful current of thought is in the hands of the Taliban's extremist ideological currents.and taking advantage of the relative stability created by the US military presence in the region and military operations to combat these terrorist groups. Continue your level of economic power. Instead, base its policy on a responsible US withdrawal from the region. The ideological background of the Taliban is not much different from that of ISIS, although it insists that its treatment of the past Taliban is very different. There is a concern that the true nature of the Taliban has not changed much, and that it will only temporarily hide some of its behavioral components until the foundations of its government are strengthened, and eventually return to the basic principles of its government.Therefore, the Taliban's main challenge to the national security of China and other countries in the region will depend on the Taliban's pattern of behavior after gaining ultimate power in Afghanistan. In this regard, China's move to build and complete new missile silos in the eastern part of Xinjiang may be interpreted as a step in preparing the country for a possible future security crisis. After the withdrawal of the United States, China will have the opportunity to expand its influence in the region and fill the power vacuum. China's positive role in the peace negotiation process over the years, and China's recognition of the Taliban as a political force, has created a Taliban-friendly image of the country that could serve as a basis for China's positive role in Afghanistan's future government. But because Afghanistan is a graveyard of superpowers, and given the experience of the Soviet Union and the United States, China will never be the third country to fill this gap with its military presence. China will avoid any military conflict or political conflict by adhering to the basic principles of non-interference in Afghanistan's internal affairs and respect for its independence and sovereignty. It should be noted, however, that this power vacuum will be so large that China alone will not be able to fill it. In this regard, China can use diplomatic solutions and strategic cooperation with Russia and Iran to pave the way for a mediation role commensurate with the common security goals and concerns. On the other hand, the main focus of China's foreign policy remains the economy, which needs a stable security environment. For this reason, along with leading the inter-Afghan peace negotiation process, it will put economic cooperation in various areas of infrastructure and investment on the agenda instead of a military presence. One of the biggest strategic mistakes of the Soviet Union and the United States during its military presence in Afghanistan was its incomplete state-building in a top-down process in a way that did not come from society and did not focus on nation-building. State-nation-building, on the other hand, is an integrated process that must be accomplished simultaneously, otherwise it will exacerbate socio-political divisions. The Soviet Union and the United States, regardless of the civil-primitive and ethnic-religious divide in Afghanistan, concentrated all their efforts on cities and neglected rural development. After the withdrawal of the United States, we see the rapid domination of the villages by Taliban forces because most of the Taliban forces and soldiers are mostly from rural areas. In contrast, China's development model is based on balancing the development of urban and rural areas. The Taliban's positive view of economic cooperation with China provides an opportunity for Beijing to take effective steps to reduce violence and accelerate the inter-Afghan peace negotiation process by developing rural and urban infrastructure by implementing economic projects and investing in Afghanistan's infrastructure. Another challenge that China will face with the sudden withdrawal of the United States and the rise of the Taliban in the region is the emergence of tensions and intensifying rivalries between China and Pakistan on the one hand and China and India on the other.Pakistan is a strategic ally and the Taliban's most important defensive barrier against India, and has used this influence to participate directly and indirectly in the Taliban peace negotiation process over the past two decades. But the level of trust in Pakistan's ability to prevent terrorist attacks against China's interests in Afghanistan has diminished, as Pakistan sees Afghanistan as its strategic depth. Pakistan, in the context of its grand strategic considerations regarding Afghanistan and the balance of power with India, is trying to maintain a balanced relationship with China, while at the same time trying not to give the Taliban full control over China. China's policy is to manage the Taliban crisis and bring the Afghan peace process to fruition, but Pakistan is playing a key role in creating a crisis in the peace process, using the Taliban as leverage to achieve strategic goals, including establishing a puppet government in Afghanistan. For this reason, many Afghan analysts believe that the Taliban's rise to power and control of Afghanistan's provinces is actually by the Pakistani military but under the cover of the Taliban. In this regard, it is possible that the complexity of Pakistan's behavior and the instability of the ruling power in the region have confronted China with a mystery called Pakistan, which will be a challenge for Chinese diplomacy.

Editorial Board of Iranian Journal of International Relations