The inevitable China factor in Trump’s Afghan strategy

BAISALI MOHANTY

With over 9,000 NATO forces staged on the ground in Afghanistan, Trump has larger
stakes in this country than in any other current conflict arena.

Source: Trump/Facebook

AFGHANISTAN TRUMP ERA

With the Trump administration riven with internal contradictions amid the escalating
crisis in Afghanistan, quite what the US president's Afghan strategy comprises raises
profound questions.

When it comes to Afghanistan, China inevitably lurks underneath as a force with which
the US must reckon. In the past, the two states positioned parallel strategies vis-à-vis
Afghanistan.In the recent times, however, a distracting detente has burgeoned between
Beijing and Moscow, attracting criticism from Washington. Meanwhile, a range of
stakeholders, including not just China and Russia but also Iran and Pakistan, have overtly
challenged the US military failure to suppress the crisis, never mind stem the large-scale
narcotics trafficking from the country. As Beijing's regional stake has risen, guided by its
security and economic goals, this has served as the stepping-stone for enhanced
involvement in Afghan affairs. In that light, Vladimir Putin has emerged as a like-minded
ally in whom Xi Jinping can confide when dealing with the Taliban.

Alongside that,Beijing has markedly accelerated its economic transactions and diplomatic
deliberations with Afghanistan, complemented by development cooperation. A pertinent
backdrop is however the rising security threat in China stemming from the Xinjiang
region; as a precautionary measure, China has emboldened its counterterrorism and
counternarcotics exercises. In the same vein, China, Russia and Pakistan have held
multiple, bilateral and multilateral, deliberations to establish frameworks to counter the
threat of so-called Islamic State (IS). When Moscow hosted such a multilateral
dialogue in February, the US was not invited, which speaks loudly of the tensions among
these states shadowing the process of reaching a political consensus on Afghanistan.

In this scenario, the US under Donald Trump has committed itself staunchly to fight
against the Taliban, as well as IS, as signaled by the recent dropping of the 'Mother of All
Bombs' in Afghanistan. With security concerns rising as diplomatic ties weaken with
Russia, amid the reverberations of Moscow's alleged collusion in Trump's election
campaign, Xi's US visit in April painted a brighter picture. Over North Korea, the Xi-
Trump interactions had supposedly positive outcomes. Hence with respect to Afghanistan
there is an urgency for the US to reconfigure its strategy towards China, as the crisis risks
running out of control. For decades, China has conveniently vaunted the Pakistan card to
soothe the Afghan Taliban, and that has been the principal element of its Afghan strategy.

In the early 2000s, according to Andrew Scobell, Lu Shunlin, China's ambassador to

Pakistan, secretly met with the reclusive Taliban leader, Mullah Omar. As Lu's Taliban
counterpart, Abdul Salam Zaeef, highlights in his 2011 book, My Life with the Taliban,
Mullah offered the ambassador assurances that the Taliban 'will not allow any group to
use its territory.' The Taliban also agreed not to facilitate any attacks on China in
exchange for Beijing's recognition of it as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.
Beijing also convinced the Taliban that it would help subdue any potential UN sanctions
against the regime.

Even though the Taliban's alliance with Al-Qaeda posed serious security threats in light
of the insurgency in Xinjiang, the Chinese continued their cooperation, albeit Beijing was
keen to secure assurances that the Taliban would not support Uighur militants.
Additionally, the Chinese provided unswerving support to their Pakistani counterparts
and indirectly their official and unofficial relationships with the Taliban. Later, as the US
formed an alliance against the Taliban regime, China nominally supported 'Operation
Enduring Freedom' to extinguish the Taliban threat and oust the movement from Kabul.

China's support was well received, yet it continued covertly to assist the Taliban. In the
face of the once-more enveloping threat from that quarter, Kabul claimed that Beijing
was maintaining a low profile, offering negligible support towards reconstruction and
development. Indeed, Afghan government officials voiced concerns over the flow of
Chinese arms to Taliban fighters in 2005. US and British media also reported then that
"Americans fighting in Afghanistan were being killed by Chinese supplied weapons, with
the full knowledge and understanding of Beijing of where these weapons are going."
In recent times, with Afghanistan still in the spotlight, China has gathered support for its
strategy to initiate peace talks with the Taliban. Beijing’s special envoy to Kabul, Deng
Xinjian, remarked: "China has always conveyed to the Taliban that it recognized the
Afghan government and has encouraged the Taliban to join the peace process." In this
triangulated regional milieu, as the US confronts the Taliban as well as IS, alongside
regional partners such as India, it also must urgently negotiate with China, to avoid the
reappearance of another ideologically-driven regime – albeit a rather different ideology to
that in North Korea – in the region. With over 9,000 NATO forces staged on the ground
in Afghanistan, Trump has larger stakes in this country than in any other current conflict
arena.

While the US has orchestrated its support for an 'Afghan-led and Afghan-owned' conflict
resolution, it also needs to engage in multilateral negotiations to press China to distance
itself from the Taliban, while engaging cautiously with Pakistan. In this scenario, the US
can also build on its relations with India as a willing partner, which has harbored growing
suspicion over escalating Taliban extremism in Afghanistan alongside contributing to
nation-building efforts there.

The Trump administration confronts a multitude of pressures on Afghanistan from

divergent sources: a few advocate complete withdrawal of NATO forces (as
earlier promised by the Obama administration), presented as the least-bad option; another
section of opinion opts for renewed US engagement with the regional actors to reach a
political resolution ; and a perceptible fragment of the strategic community
has urged plunging more troops into the long-drawn-out Afghan war. Among the global
dynamics of the crisis in Afghanistan, continued IS expansion there threatens the stability
of western countries, particularly the US.

Hence, the need of the hour is for the US to join hands with willing and like-minded
partners to conclude a sustainable strategy for peaceful nation-building in Afghanistan.
Abandonment of the turmoil would risk a catastrophe with huge global repercussions.

The author is a Research Intern at Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi.

This commentary originally appeared in The Huffington Post.