Posted on 04/07/2022 4:22:25 AM PDT by FarCenter
Even without formally recognizing Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, Beijing is making fast inroads into the war-torn country effectively governed by the United States until last year’s ignominious retreat and withdrawal.
With the US and West now firmly focused on the war in Ukraine and the Afghan “forever war” a fast-fading memory, China is now helping the Taliban consolidate its power in exchange for guarantees it won’t allow terrorist groups, including the anti-China East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), to operate from its territory.
In a recent multinational meeting in the ancient town of Tunxi that gathered representatives from Afghanistan’s neighbors, namely Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, China asserted that Afghanistan must not be excluded from the international community.
Hitting out the US for creating a situation that has left about 90% of the Afghan population without sufficient food, according to the most recent UN estimates, the meeting’s participants agreed to launch a “Tunxi Initiative” to alleviate local hunger and deprivation.
But China’s primary interest in Afghanistan is not humanitarian but rather to notch a “win-win” deal that fortifies its security against cross-border terrorist threats, especially in its Xinjiang region where Beijing has been accused of “genocide” against Muslim minority Uighurs held in camps, and paves the way for the extension of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Central Asia.
On the other side of the “win-win”, China agrees to “respect” the Taliban’s religiously orthodox and ethnically exclusionary regime, both sticking points with the Western nations that floated the previous secular Ashraf Ghani government with aid and assistance that has been withheld from the Taliban.
(Excerpt) Read more at asiatimes.com ...
The Chicoms are like fire ants swarming the planet.
The British, Russians, and U.S. all failed in Afghanistan. Now it’s China’s turn.
The thing that our State Department refused to admit, is that the Islamists have popular support, and that the Afgans were repelled by the feminism and LGBT themes that we were pushing to satisfy US leftists.
I’m in favor of letting China have Afganistan. And Africa too.
An agreement with the Taliban is about as useful as an agreement with the Chinese. It will be broken as soon as it is in either party’s interest to cheat on it.
There will never be a centralized government in Afghanistan. I give China two years until the regional tribes start killing the Chinese military.
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