Commentary
China on Dec. 5 raised the idea of
official recognition of the Taliban, which should be considered a terrorist group. Four days earlier, Beijing accepted the diplomatic credentials of the Afghan
Taliban’s new “ambassador” to Beijing. That the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the first to afford such recognition—despite two decades of purposeful Taliban slaughter of Afghan civilians—is par for the Party’s avaricious course.
In
2008, a Chinese state-owned mining company purchased a concession from the former Afghan government and likely paid the Taliban protection money for its security. The CCP met secretly with Taliban officials in both
2014 and
2015. The CCP met with the Taliban despite that, in
2013 alone, anti-government Afghan forces (primarily the Taliban) killed more than 2,000 civilians (for comparison, pro-government forces only killed 341 that year).
Since at least this period, the Chinese regime has arguably been complicit in Taliban terrorism, which includes the
killing of 128 U.S. soldiers in 2013. The Taliban killed more civilians during this period than did pro-government forces because the terrorists purposefully targeted civilians. A
truck bomb that targeted a market in 2014, for example, killed at least 89 civilians.
Chinese Foreign Minister
Wang Yi was one of the first to publicly invite Taliban leaders to his country. They met in Tianjin, on China’s coast, in July 2021. The following month, the Taliban took Kabul. China kept its embassy in the Taliban conquest, promised about
$30 million, and signed an oil extraction agreement. That September, Beijing and Moscow argued for the release of about
$10 billion in frozen overseas Afghan funds to the terrorists.
Beijing seeks
border security with Afghanistan and protections against what the U.S. State Department believes is a phantom threat: the so-called
East Turkistan Islamic Movement. The group has been defunct since 2003, except as an excuse for the CCP’s genocide against the Uyghurs. Beijing also seeks to extract as much as $3 trillion of mineral wealth from Afghanistan and an extension of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI,
also known as One Belt, One Road). The CCP can use Afghanistan to further its influence in Central Asia and as another U.N. vote for dictators.
In exchange, the Taliban seeks trade, development, and humanitarian assistance, and help to get Afghanistan’s embassies, missions, and consulates around the world under control. It wants this with “no internal interference,” which is how dictators say to each other, “You can oppress your people if I can oppress mine.”
The United States and its allies are pressuring the Taliban to improve its treatment of women. It flogs them in public and bans girls’ secondary education. Two additional reports have gotten little media attention. First, a former Afghan intelligence chief claims that the Taliban is seeking a
tactical nuclear weapon. Second, a
Pakistani diplomat claims that the Taliban is attempting to withhold counterterrorism cooperation until Islamabad officially recognizes the terrorists.
Beijing has long supported Pakistan with tens of billions of dollars. Pakistani military and intelligence elements have, in turn, supported the Taliban, which raises questions about whether Beijing directed Islamabad to support the terrorists since they were at the time fighting the United States. Afghanistan is a strategic location for U.S. air bases to deter China. Former President Donald Trump had said he wanted to do a trade deal with the Taliban to get Bagram Air Base back under U.S. control.
In 2022, Mr. Wang visited
Kabul shortly after the foreign ministers of Pakistan and Qatar. He likely sought better access for Chinese companies—including state-owned Metallurgical Corporation of China Ltd.—to
copper mines. The country also has gold, iron, and lithium.
In January, China’s Xinjiang Central Asia Petroleum and Gas Co. Ltd. signed a
$540 million oil and gas deal with the Taliban. Sanctions against the Taliban make it difficult for U.S. companies to operate in Afghanistan, which facilitates easier access for rogue regimes such as those of China and Iran.
Last spring, the Taliban met with the foreign ministers of China and Pakistan and discussed adding a
Huawei security camera network to Afghan cities, which reportedly already have 62,000 such devices.
In September, the Taliban attended the
BRI conference in Beijing. It said Afghanistan wanted to join BRI projects, including the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, and could build a BRI road from Afghanistan’s far northeast to China through the slender Wakhan corridor.
If these and other terror links maintained by the CCP are any indication, China will be the first country to officially recognize Taliban rule as legitimate. That will open the door for other states to follow suit. Some have called for the Taliban to be invited to the annual climate conference, including the COP28, currently held in the United Arab Emirates.
But the world shouldn’t further reward terrorism with recognitions that result in Taliban demands for additional international funding, which would be yet more complicity with terrorism. A better approach would extend the sanctions imposed on the Taliban to any regime that supports it, including those in Beijing and Tehran.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
