China’s meetings in July with Taliban leaders who now look set to rule in Afghanistan generated speculation that Chinese investment and influence would flow into the country after the departure of the US and its allies.
However, if China – as Afghanistan’s wealthiest and most powerful neighbour – sees opportunity as the US exits, reports by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) make for sobering reading.
SIGAR warned for years that corruption and crime networks were poisoning efforts to establish an Afghan national government, not least because the heads of the crime cartels were often part of the government, siphoning off billions of dollars in aid and undermining public support in the process.
“We found that corruption cut across all aspects of the reconstruction effort, jeopardising progress made in security, rule of law, governance, and economic growth,” one SIGAR report said as long as five years ago. US reconstruction programmes risked failure due to “systemic corruption”, it said.
Chinese commentators say Beijing has learned important lessons from US actions in Afghanistan and would not be taking the same approach.
“The biggest difference between the US and China is that we don’t interfere in domestic politics of other countries,” said Liu Zongyi, secretary general of the Centre for China and South Asia Cooperation at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies. “If China invests in Afghanistan in the near future it will focus on the people’s livelihood and humanitarian aid.”
Liu said the US invested with the intent of exporting democracy, ignoring the country’s Islamic traditions that worked against the implementation of a Western-style political system.
Crime cartels
Aside from an estimated US$837 billion over 20 years in military expenditure, Washington spent another US$145 billion trying to rebuild Afghanistan, the biggest such programme in US history, according to SIGAR which was established by Congress as an independent watchdog over the conflict.
While SIGAR acknowledged improvements in health care and education, it also said various US administrations had failed to tackle corruption, despite warnings from military leaders on the ground and embassy assessments in Kabul.
In the same report, SIGAR cited a 2010 cable from the US embassy which outlined “the unpunished abuse of power by corrupt officials and power brokers, a widespread sense of political disenfranchisement … and the corrosive effect on governance at the highest levels by patronage networks often financed by narco-trafficking and other criminal activity”.
Terrorism researcher Raffaello Pantucci, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said China may well be in a position to criticise US failures in Afghanistan, but its investments in the country face the same corruption problems that stumped Washington’s nation-building efforts.
“If you go into a corrupt state to do infrastructure you are probably just going to make the corruption and inequality worse,” he said.
One example given by Pantucci was a US$400 million oilfield project in northern Afghanistan, a collaboration between Chinese energy giant China National Petroleum Corporation and the Watan Group – reportedly owned by two cousins of former Afghan president Hamid Karzai.
There has been little progress since the contract was signed in 2011 and, despite the Karzai connection, local power brokers had tried to extort money from the project, according to Pantucci.
“The country is so militarised, Balkanised, with warlords and power brokers that control different parts of the country, sometimes they get into government, sometimes they are against the government,” he said.
Du Youkang, a former diplomat with Chinese embassies in India and Pakistan, said each project backed by Chinese investment needed to be rolled out on a case-by-case basis, taking into account risk conditions on the ground. “The lower the risk, the better,” said Du, now director of the Pakistan Study Centre at Shanghai-based Fudan University.
China had already made huge investments in Afghanistan, including a US$3 billion copper mine, so a future Taliban government should provide security to Chinese-backed projects in the country, he said, noting this was a common approach in Pakistan.
“A lot of Chinese have just left Afghanistan, so they are not investing, but the problem is a lot of our assets are still there so after the situation has stabilised we have to go back, so much money has gone in there.”
Tribalisation
Some Chinese analysts have highlighted Afghanistan’s potential future role in Beijing’s strategies, like the globe-spanning Belt and Road Initiative.
But commerce ministry researcher Mei Xinyu has criticised the eagerness in some quarters to increase China’s involvement in Afghanistan, describing the country’s potential as a “crossroads of civilisations” as an “illusion behind closed doors”.
The country’s isolationist history and persistent wars meant it was not in position to play a key role in international trade or transport, he wrote on Aisixiang.com, a website which publishes articles by Chinese scholars on current affairs.
Mei – who is known as a nationalist commentator among his 1.5 million followers on social media platform Weibo – also cited “the increasingly closed, retrogressive and tribalisation of Afghan society”.
Pantucci, a former visiting scholar at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, contrasted the US role in Afghanistan with China’s long-standing policy of non-intervention.
“As Afghanistan’s richest and most influential neighbour, there was an underlying expectation that China would be able to play a more significant role in the country,” he said, in an article published last November by the Oxus Society for Central Affairs, a Washington-based non-profit which fosters academic exchange with Central Asia.
“Instead, China has studiously hedged, continuing to offer the potential for engagement but never quite following through,” he wrote.
The Great Game
Afghanistan has a long history of conflict and invasion. The British took control of the country in the 19th century as part of its so-called Great Game rivalry with the Russian Empire, before eventually retreating.
The Soviet Union invaded and occupied Afghanistan for about 10 years from 1979, which was followed by years of civil war before the US and its allies invaded in 2001. The US invasion, weeks after the September 11 attacks by al-Qaeda, toppled the Taliban government, which Washington said was providing safe haven to the perpetrators.
Its stated goals in Afghanistan included eliminating al-Qaeda and fighting the Taliban to deny all terrorist groups a refuge in the country. In tandem, the US aimed to build an Afghan security force and stable civilian government.
The conflict killed 2,443 American troops and 1,144 allied soldiers, according to the US Department of Defence. Many more Afghans lost their lives, with at least 66,000 Afghan troops dead along with more than 48,000 civilians. The Afghan fatalities are likely to be significant underestimations, according to SIGAR.
Ma Haiyun, an associate professor of history at Frostburg State University in the US, said Beijing was ill-equipped to deal with Afghanistan’s fractured society because it lacked a network on the ground. China’s suppression of the Uygur Muslim population in its far-western region of Xinjiang, which borders Afghanistan, had been a missed opportunity to sway events over the border, he said.
“China destroyed a resource that it could have used to expand its influence into Central Asia,” said Ma, who researches China’s relations with the Muslim world and is an ethnic Hui, another of China’s Muslim minorities.
Beijing has been accused by the US and other Western nations of human rights abuses against the Uygurs, a Turkic ethnic group with a population of more than 12 million, mostly in Xinjiang. China has said its actions in Xinjiang were in response to protests and riots that killed hundreds of people as well as separatist and Islamist terrorist threats in the region.
Beijing has already sought an assurance from the Taliban that it will cut ties with the East Turkestan Independence Movement (ETIM), a group of militant Uygurs who envisage an Islamic caliphate in an area that would include Xinjiang.
Ma said Beijing was hoping a new Taliban government would prevent ETIM activities in exchange for support and investment, but he argues that the Taliban would never attack ETIM on Beijing’s orders.
“The Taliban were willing to lose power over Osama bin Laden, do you think they will fight a war with ETIM? China can only ask nicely at this stage and give money,” he said. The scenario gives the Taliban leverage over China, he said. “It’s not an equal relationship.”
The instability in Afghanistan and the threat of a resurgent ETIM has led to speculation that China itself may be sucked into direct intervention in the country, a possibility seen as unlikely by Koichiro Tanaka, a professor at Japan’s Keio University Graduate School of Media and Governance, and a former political affairs officer with the United Nations Special Mission to Afghanistan.
“I see less possibility that China will launch a military attack or intervention inside Afghanistan. They have the capability to do so, but China being sucked into the quagmire that is Afghanistan would just aggravate the situation,” said Tanaka, who has helped supervise elections in Afghanistan.
He added that if China were to intervene militarily in Afghanistan, it would boost support for ETIM or other separatist movements that may exist inside China. “That is playing with fire and then getting caught in the fire at home,” he said.
“The Chinese have learned the lessons from the mistakes of the British, Soviets and Americans [in Afghanistan]. They may want to crush the elements that may have had a hand in the terrorist attacks inside China, but would do that through the Taliban, via the influence of Pakistan.”
Source: South China Morning Post