China's Afghan moment has arrived

Thu, Sep 02, 2021

Asad Latif

https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/opi...nt-has-arrived

HOW China deals with Afghanistan in the aftermath of America's retreat from its longest war may signal the ambit of China's coming global role. Indeed, American contraction creates opportunities for the expansion of Chinese objectives in the Greater Middle East, of which Afghanistan is a part.

History ties the two nations together. Both are survivors of Western imperium.

China's recovery from a century of national humiliation by Western powers and Japan from 1839 to 1949 is parallelled by Afghanistan's success in rebuffing any externally imposed order on its polity and society. Three Anglo-Afghan Wars (1839 to 1842; 1878 to 1880; 1919) in which Britain, acting from its base in India, sought to oppose Russian influence in Afghanistan, ended in abysmal failure for the invaders.

So did the Soviet Union's invasion in 1979. The Taliban appeared in the seminaries of the restive region as a Muslim counterforce to Soviet "infidels". Once they had left, a deliriously rejuvenated Taliban turned against American "infidels", who invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and stayed for two decades till they retreated.

What has disappeared in Afghanistan is a papier-mache polity crafted in Washington, inhabited by a puppet government and guarded by the toy army of a kindergarten state.

What survives is the reality of the Afghan people. While Americans might welcome the end of their longest war, Afghans know that their wars could be endless. As the analyst Akhilesh Pillalamarri writes perceptively, Afghans "have nowhere to go, and therefore can fight their whole lives", an ironic "luxury that outsiders do not have".

China could insert itself into Afghanistan's post-imperial history. China has no imperial record in contemporary Afghanistan.

Indeed, Beijing possesses political currency and moral leverage in the whole of the Greater Middle East, a region that unites the Arab world with Afghanistan, Cyprus, Iran, Israel, Pakistan and Turkey. China was never a party to the imperial cartography that produced endless conflicts in that region. Thus, China befriends both Palestine and Israel without being accused of bad faith by either side.

This said, even post-communist and post-atheist China would fall into the ranks of the Taliban's "infidel" nations because it is not ruled by sharia law, but not all infidels are the same.

The Taliban, which is close to a Pakistan that enjoys an all-weather friendship with China, might be amenable to Chinese initiatives that do not affect the role of religion in family affairs nor the Afghan tribal balance of power, but still put in an ameliorative word for women and ethnic minorities.

The Taliban could be open to Chinese views because, like the United States, China carries global heft but, unlike America, China is not fixated ideologically on achieving global democracy even through violent regime change (whether successfully as in Iraq and Libya or unsuccessfully as in Syria).

ASSUMING RESPONSIBILITY FOR GLOBAL COMMONS

By contrast with the United States, China has not been at war since its hostilities with Vietnam in 1979, which occurred during the Cold War. The absence of what might be called a warring China forms a major part of the attraction of its rise to those at the receiving end of Western power.

So long as China does not become an imperial power itself, it could act as a balancer in the international relations of the Greater Middle East. Post-imperial Afghanistan would be a good place to start.

What Afghanistan is experiencing under the Taliban is akin to what China itself witnessed during the Cultural Revolution: an aberrant moment of politics dominated by the extremist and adventurist distortion of a mainstream faith (Islam) or an ideology (communism). The moment passed. Much as the Cultural Revolutionaries were reclaimed by mainstream Chinese political culture eventually, it is not inconceivable that the Taliban will be re-incorporated into mainstream Muslim globalism ultimately.

The Iranian example is instructive here. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 produced a violently revisionist state that rejected the norms of the international order. However, Iran is today a normal state in most senses of the term except for accusations that it exports terror.

International terrorism is a present threat. However, the Taliban does not have to be a part of that nefarious reality. Now that it is in power, rather than fighting for it, the provision of Afghan sanctuaries for foreign groups such as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria would present it with a tactical, but not a strategic choice.

That is, the Taliban does not need the strategic support of those transnational groups to rule Afghanistan: It will use them only to increase its tactical bargaining power with other nations so as to strengthen its grip on Afghanistan. If the Taliban's rule within is unchallenged, it will not need to challenge the challenge without.

China could make a significant difference to the Taliban's choices by underlining its agnostic position on how Afghanistan is ruled. Beijing might have to make concessions to Kabul, for example over the punitive treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang. In return, though, China could win important help from Afghanistan in preventing the transborder East Turkestan Islamic Movement from fomenting violent discord in China. With China not intent on bringing down the post-American Taliban, the new regime would possess little political utility in encouraging terrorism across the border.

Chinese political investment in Afghan stability would resonate in the Greater Middle East. There has to be a third way beyond the two blind alleys of terrorism and invasion, neither of which can win. China can show that third way.

The rest of the world will benefit if Afghanistan can survive without trying to destroy others through the attrition of interstate terrorism, thanks to a China that is well on its way to assuming responsibility for the global commons.

China's historical innocence in the colonial creation of the Greater Middle East is a source of unknown strength for the future. History can never be rewritten, but no new word ever escapes the grammar of memory.