Brian M Downing
The US went into Afghanistan in 2001 with the ambitious goals of democratizing the country and modernizing the economy. Neither goal has even been approximated, the enterprise is in a shambles, and Afghanistan faces an unpromising future. Development programs have done more for Swiss banks than Afghan villages. Ethnic and tribal mistrust may be higher than ever. The political system is hopelessly corrupt, incompetent, and unstable. That’s fertile ground for insurgency and the crops are doing well.
As the years plod along, fighting season after fighting season, attention has been paid to battles and skirmishes, votes and disputes, troop and territorial losses. Largely in the background, Afghanistan is being integrated into Beijing’s co-prosperity sphere, as is much of Central Asia.
No country deserves peace more than Afghanistan but no country is as vulnerable to exploitation, meddling, and warfare. Over the last forty years Afghanistan has fought Russians and Americans. The pieces are in place for a war with China.
The investment
Chinese diplomats and engineers studied Soviet and American geological surveys that estimated $1 trillion dollars in mineral wealth. China, Inc has been busily acquiring a large portion of that wealth. Negotiations usually conclude with a generous gift to obliging Kabul politicians.
Some gas fields are nearing depletion but new oil and gas deposits are being developed in the north. Immense copper and iron mines are underway in the center. Rare earths, critical to cell phones, medical equipment, 5G networks, and military hardware, are mined in the southwest. China already has considerable control over the global market in rare earths and has threatened to use this advantage against rivals.
Railroads and highways have been built to send raw materials back to China. Extraction routes run south into Pakistan, west into Iran, and north into Uzbekistan – tributaries in Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative that will connect China to Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
China has made very little military investment – only a small deployment into the spur connecting Afghanistan with Xinjiang Province. The troops are there to prevent Uighur veterans of al Qaeda and ISIL from returning home and fomenting Islamist resistance. (China’s rivals might well take note of this.)
Security for China’s investment, paradoxically, lies in the hands of the US, its dwindling allies, and the Afghan military. The former are leaving, the latter is faltering.
The territory
Optimal exploitation calls for an end to large-scale fighting and for security near assets, roads, railways, and personnel. Beijing must be calculating if this is possible. The prospects are not good.
Afghanistan has never been a unified country and forty years of war have weakened what respect there was for central government, strengthened tribal-ethnic loyalties, and sharpened animosities between regions.
There is a significant north-south division: Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Turkmen in the north and two sprawling Pashtun confederations in the south. The north feels the Pashtuns have too many high positions in army and state and are uncomfortably close to Pakistan. The Pashtun feel the same about northerners’ positions. Power in Kabul is uncomfortably shared by a Pashtun (Ghani) and a Tajik (Abdullah). Each denounces the other and at times the already weak state is paralyzed.
An agreement with the Taliban will not solve the division. Northerners already see Kabul as too willing to accommodate the Taliban and have been forming militias and stockpiling arms in the event of a breakdown of the agreement and a state collapse as well.
Decades of war have warped the culture, especially regarding young men. Traditional work as herders, farmers, and tradesmen has lost its traditional appeal. The figures they look up to have carried Kalashnikovs and served with renowned commanders such as Mullah Omar, Massoud, Dostum, and Ismail Khan. Fathers may be war-weary, but sons yearn for honor and glory in battle.
Chinese operations are sprawling across a heterogeneous country ill- disposed to foreign presences in their home valleys and districts. The British established a measure of peace but it was broken by occasional reprisals on Pathan villages. The Russians responded to ambushes by hammering nearby towns with artillery for several days. Despite all its aid, Americans might be be better remembered for installing corrupt officials, sending streams of engineers and consultants who accomplish little, and using heavy airpower that killed thousands of civilians.
The conflict
Negotiations with the Taliban may bring a sustained reduction in hostilities. That of course would be welcome by all – or nearly all. Local sensibilities, built on centuries of hard experience, will pay greater attention to the already large-scale Chinese presence and its acceleration since the end of large-scale fighting.
Parts of the Taliban will abide by a settlement, others are more radical in temperament and internationalist in scope. They will want to continue the fight in order to seize more of the country and even look beyond the borders.
A fractious country, hostile to foreign footprints and replete with well-armed men and militias, will turn on Chinese engineers and workers, especially as those outsiders are energized by heady notions of global ascendance, cultural superiority, and destiny. There will be infighting between Afghan groups, as during the Russian and American wars, but formidable opposition, based in mountainous redoubts in many regions, will be directed against the new occupiers.
Beijing has likely considered the prospect of inheriting the same conflict-laden swathe of land that burdened Britain, Russia, and the United States over the last two hundred years. Why not call a halt to exploitation, perhaps limit operations to a few sites and extraction routes? Or even write off the investments there, sizable though they are, and move on to more promising parts of Central Asia? After all, the Soviet Union wrote off its effort in 1988. The US is doing the same now. They’ve probably read Santayana.
Two things will press China ahead. First, as stewards of a rising power that will soon restore its central position in the world, the Beijing leadership believes it can accomplish anything. It has the resources and personnel to perform its historical mission and it must not back down.
Second, Afghanistan is not only an economic opportunity, it’s also a security matter. China is deeply concerned that Uighur and Uzbek fighters, now serving with al Qaeda and ISIL, will one day spread to other parts of Central Asia (a concern to Russia too) and also to China’s restive Xinjiang region. Better to fight them over there than at home.
The accelerants
The thought of jihadis leaving Afghanistan to fight in China raises the opposite one of jihadis coming to Afghanistan to fight China. That happened with the Soviets in the eighties, to the Americans in Iraq twenty years later, and to the Syrian government since the Arab Spring. Indigenous guerrilla attacks could become far more numerous and lethal. The Islamic world has no shortage of young men who are hostile to their governments, enamored by Islamist texts and veteran lore, and ardent for glory and honor in their own war. They probably haven’t read Wilfred Owen.
Afghanistan is already home to al Qaeda and ISIL bands ensconced in mountainous areas, comprising fighters from many countries and often intermarried with local tribes. Some have come there from the battlefields of Iraq and Syria. Networks stretching back to the Middle East, Maghreb, and European ghettoes are intact.
In southwest Pakistan, just below the rugged but permeable frontier, are the Balochs. They want autonomy and seethe at the increasing Chinese presence in their resource-laden province. (Fellow Balochs in southwestern Iran are taking up arms against Tehran.) In Pakistan’s north is the Tehrik-i-Taliban (Pashtun kin of the Afghan Taliban) many of whom are as violent and internationalist as AQ. Other groups such as Lashkar-i-Jhangvi have been nurtured by the Pakistani military and steeped in a fusion of nationalism, Islam, and violence. The generals cannot always control them and fear to cross them.
The Uighur of China and across Central Asia and the Middle East are angered by Beijing’s growing presence and iron fist. In Xinjiang they are persecuted for their faith, dispossessed of property, and held in huge reeducation and work camps. There is already evidence of young men leaving China and making their way to jihadi groups.Young Arab men see the Uighur plight and are angered by their rulers’ reluctance to criticize a major trade partner and rising regional power.
The allies
Russia and Iran will help China stabilize Afghanistan and benefit from the co-prosperity sphere. Each has ties with northern people and each has some rapport with the Taliban. Both powers despise the Taliban but see them as a means of bleeding the US and diminishing public support for foreign involvements. Furthermore, Moscow and Tehran see the Taliban as inevitable winners and as partners who will contain the spread of AQ and ISIL into Iran’s restive Sunni southeast and Russia’s Islamic regions and Near Abroad.
It’s not clear Russia and Iran can forestall anti-Chinese militancy. Neither is likely to send troops. They will, however, deliver aid and use their influence with notables. Iran is well regarded by the Hazaras, a Shia people, and by the Tajiks, who share cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Putin, through his Chechen vassal Kadyrov, has been courting the Uzbek warlord Abdul Dostum, who over the years has demonstrated a disposition to serve wherever he sees his best interests at the time.
Pakistan is a more complicated case. China is well aware that bin Laden was protected near a Pakistani army base. Beijing will lean hard on Islamabad to rein in not only the Taliban, but also the slew of Islamist groups it supports in a foreboding redoubt in eastern Afghanistan, all of whom would be in the vanguard of volunteers in an anti-Chinese insurgency. However, those groups help Pakistan in its Kashmiri programs. In any case, the militants might well turn on their epauletted benefactors in Rawalpindi.
The adversaries
Those who take up arms against the Chinese presence will attract foreign support. The United States and Saudi Arabia backed the mujahideen. Pakistan, Iran, and Russia aid the Taliban today. The Chinese are making enemies around the world and Afghanistan will be an attractive place to bleed them.
India, though benefiting from Beijing’s trade and investment, is greatly concerned by its geopolitical positioning. China and India have skirmished along their border in the mountains of Kashmir. Beijing has been building a presence around the subcontinent – the “string of pearls” that can one day be tightened around India’s neck. Pakistan, with whom India has fought several wars, is becoming uncomfortably close to China.
New Delhi’s intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing, almost certainly is supporting Baloch insurgents in Pakistan’s west, who feel, with some justification, that Islamabad illegally annexed Baluchistan back in 1947. Insurgencies have come and gone ever since. One is on now, spurred by Chinese development of Baluchistan’s ports and resources.
The Uighur would be another valuable ally – in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and in their Xinjiang which, like Baluchistan, is bring exploited. India is likely communicating with them. Many Uighur are leaving Xinjiang to serve in jihadi groups. Many exit down the Mekong through Southeast Asia. Vietnam has been warring with China since India was ruled by the Mughals.
One of the more lethal allies of India would be the al Qaeda and ISIL bands in Afghanistan. Though presently close to Pakistan, as noted they may turn on Islamabad if China presses hard for a break. They are devoted to war and move from band to band, conflict to conflict, as opportunity and pay present themselves.
The US is trying to reduce military commitments in the Middle East and Afghanistan in order to concentrate on China and Russia. Ending American military and aid presence in Afghanistan would allow it to use the region against China. American intelligence officers and financial resources could complement those of India – at a far lower price than expended over the last nineteen years.
A significant number of Afghan insurgents could be brought to bear on Chinese assets. Beijing would face the dilemma of abandoning its investment or building a military presence, either with its own troops, who’ve not been in a war since the incursion into Vietnam in 1979 or the Korean War, or with Pakistani troops and mercenaries – as the British did with sepoys from the Punjab.
The same ire over Chinese exploitation in Afghanistan is emerging across Central Asia, from Kyrgyzstan to the Caucasus. Islamist militancy is already percolating there and eager young men are making the trek to join Islamist bands in the Middle East and Afghanistan. The heretofore forgotten region could become rife with something akin to the anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia after World War Two.
A considerable portion of Islamist militancy could shift its attention from the US and the West to China and its Iranian and Russian allies. To paraphrase a revolutionary from a receding past – two, three, many Afghanistans.
© 2020 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who’s written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. Thanks as ever to Susan Ganosellis.