A devastating school bombing in Kabul has Chinese officials complaining about President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the latest episode in a tit-for-tat between the two world powers.
“It needs to be pointed out that the recent, abrupt U.S. announcement of complete withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan has led to a succession of explosive attacks throughout the country, worsening the security situation and threatening peace and stability as well as people’s life and safety,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said.
That statement underscores Beijing’s unease with a scenario that is coming to pass in part due to the refusal by Chinese strategists to cooperate with U.S. efforts to defeat the militants in the country. China benefited from U.S. counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan, which helped keep a lid on potential terrorist threats along the Chinese border, even as Chinese officials cultivated ties with the Taliban and resisted U.S. calls for diplomatic help in isolating the militant group — culminating in Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from the apparently intractable conflict over the next several months.
“China calls on foreign troops in Afghanistan to take into full account the security of people in the country and the region, pull out in a responsible manner, and avoid inflicting more turmoil and suffering on the Afghan people,” Hua said Sunday.
‘THREAT TO IRAN’: BIDEN’S DECISION TO LEAVE AFGHANISTAN PUTS PRESSURE ON US RIVALS
The Taliban has denied responsibility for the attack on the school for girls, which left scores of teenage students dead, according to Afghan officials. The Taliban has proven resilient throughout nearly two decades of war since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks, chiefly because of support from neighboring Pakistan. Chinese officials have significant influence in Pakistan — the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is one of the most substantial infrastructure initiatives in Beijing’s portfolio — but they declined to induce the Pakistani government to cut ties with the Taliban.
“Instead, both the Taliban and Pakistan managed to persuade Beijing that they would further China’s interest in ensuring that no support for Uyghur militants and activists in Xinjiang came from either Afghanistan or Pakistan, the Brookings Institution’s Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert in nonstate armed actors, wrote last year in a survey of China’s involvement in Afghanistan. “This embrace of the Taliban is a reversal of China’s attitudes toward the group in the 1990s when China mostly supported the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance along with India, Russia, Iran, and the United States, even though that policy put it at odds with its ally Pakistan.”
Chinese officials have established mass detention camps in Xinjiang while taking aggressive steps to suppress the birth rates of Uyghur women as part of a repressive policy that the State Department has deemed a genocide. Taliban leaders have “been deafeningly silent about the Chinese brutalization of its fellow Sunnis in Xinjiang,” as Felbab-Brown observed.
Still, a recent bombing of a hotel in the Pakistani city of Quetta, where the Chinese ambassador to Pakistan was staying, has raised the prospect that the Pakistani Taliban, known by the acronym TTP, are beginning to take aim at China. (The ambassador was unharmed.)
“If TTP has really decided to wage war against Chinese interests in Pakistan, then the projects associated with CPEC will hit a roadblock,” Pakistan-based journalist Adnan Aamir wrote last week in The Interpreter, which is published by the Lowy Institute in Australia. “After the withdrawal of US-led forces from Afghanistan in September, Afghanistan is likely to fall further into chaos. Such a situation will allow TTP to grow in strength as their ideological bothers [sic] in the Afghan Taliban exert control.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Hua pledged to “continue our firm support for the Afghan government” in pursuit of peace. “We also stand ready to work with the international community to help Afghanistan realize peace at an early date,” she said.
