Follow us on social

Taliban’s triumph threatens Beijing’s Eurasia plans

Taliban’s triumph threatens Beijing’s Eurasia plans

If China has learned anything from its recent experiences in Pakistan, it will proceed cautiously with a small footprint in Afghanistan.

Analysis | Asia-Pacific

The great powers’ shifting interests in Afghanistan can be dizzying to behold. Washington says its retreat will allow it to counter an assertive China in Asia. Beijing, for its part, is using the chaotic withdrawal to poke holes in America’s promises to its Asian allies as it seeks regional supremacy.

If China has learned anything from its recent experiences in Pakistan, it will proceed cautiously with a small footprint in Afghanistan.

Until recently, Beijing had been ambivalent toward the American presence in Afghanistan. China benefited from NATO counterterrorism efforts. As recently as 2018 U.S. forces destroyed a militant training camp in Badakhshan, a mountainous province that borders Tajikistan, Pakistan and China. The camp was allegedly used by the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a Muslim separatist group fighting for independence in Xinjiang.

Yet Beijing also perceived the presence of U.S. forces as part of a broader strategy to contain China. Chinese strategists have since 2010 referred to a “C-shaped encirclement ring” that stretches from Japan to Afghanistan and “squeezes China’s strategic space.”

With the Americans out of the way, China will now try to integrate Afghanistan into its own regional order.

Rush Doshi, President Biden’s newly appointed director for China on the National Security Council, argues in a recent book that Beijing is pursuing “blunting and building,” followed by a global plan for expansion – all of which “seek to restore China to its due place and roll back the historical aberration of the West’s overwhelming global influence.”

For China to become a new regional hegemon, Beijing needs to establish a form of control in each country. To that end, Doshi explains, its repertoire includes coercion, incentives, and legitimacy.

Beijing is unlikely to step in militarily; it considers Afghanistan a strategic trap. Instead, China’s weapon of choice for gaining leverage, which it has honed with the multi-continent Belt and Road Initiative, is to become an indispensable economic partner.

The end goal of China’s Eurasia strategy, reasons Nadège Rolland, a senior fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research, is a situation “where the multiplication of dependencies to China have created enough positive incentives and coercive leverage to ultimately compel regional countries to defer to Beijing’s wishes, and constrict their ability and willingness to defy and resist against China’s power.”

The fact that most, if not all regional stakeholders – Russia, Iran, and the Central Asian states – share China’s core interest in seeing a stable Afghanistan works to Beijing’s advantage. Further, China enjoys robust political and economic relations with all of Afghanistan’s neighbors.

Beijing has already started paving the way for recognition of the new Taliban government.

A few weeks before the Taliban entered Kabul on August 15, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi hosted Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in Tianjin. He called the group “an important military and political force in Afghanistan […] expected to play an important role in the country's peace, reconciliation and reconstruction process.”

China’s state-controlled media have signaled the kind of deal Beijing hopes to strike: Economic investments for assurances that the Taliban will not harbor transnational terrorist groups that threaten China’s interests.   

Though the Taliban’s political leaders have assured Beijing it has nothing to fear, there are no guarantees they can control all the factions that have been fighting under the Taliban banner for the past two decades. Today’s Taliban is comprised of different groups, some of which are powerful and semi-autonomous. This raises the question of capability; even if one group is pragmatic and willing to cooperate with China, it might not be able to force others to do the same.    

The Haqqani Network is a good example of the challenge facing China.  

Arguably the strongest force within the larger Taliban, this faction of hardliners is allied to the Pakistani Taliban or TTP, which is believed to have been involved in a July 14 bomb attack in Pakistan that killed nine Chinese workers. Then on August 20, a suicide bomber targeted a Chinese convoy in Gwadar, killing two local children. The Chinese embassy in Islamabad released an unusually strong statement, calling on Pakistan to improve security.

These are ominous signs for China’s flagship Belt and Road project – the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) – and a specter of the sorts of trouble China could face were it to increase its investments in Afghanistan.

Under President Xi Jinping, China is challenging American power regionally and globally. In Eurasia, its emerging order depends on strong economic linkages like the CPEC. If this vision is to succeed, Afghanistan cannot be isolated and allowed to fester.

So Afghanistan will test China’s ability to become the hegemon it wants to be.

This article has been republished with permission from Eurasianet.


Gil Corzo / Shutterstock.com|
Analysis | Asia-Pacific
Trump Vance Rubio
Top image credit: President Donald Trump meets with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance before a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Monday, August 18, 2025, in the Oval Office. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)

The roots of Trump's wars on terror trace back to 9/11

Global Crises

The U.S. military recently launched a plainly illegal strike on a small civilian Venezuelan boat that President Trump claims was a successful hit on “narcoterrorists.” Vice President JD Vance responded to allegations that the strike was a war crime by saying, “I don’t give a shit what you call it,” insisting this was the “highest and best use of the military.”

This is only the latest troubling development in the Trump administration’s attempt to repurpose “War on Terror” mechanisms to use the military against cartels and to expedite his much vaunted mass deportation campaign, which he says is necessary because of an "invasion" at the border.

keep readingShow less
President Trump with reporters
Top photo credit: President Donald Trump speaks with members of the media at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland on Sunday, September 7, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)

Is Israel forcing Trump to be the capitulator in chief?

Middle East

President Donald Trump told reporters outside a Washington restaurant Tuesday evening that he is deeply displeased with Israel’s bombardment of Qatar, a close U.S. partner in the Persian Gulf that, at Washington’s request, has hosted Hamas’s political leadership since 2012.

“I am not thrilled about it. I am not thrilled about the whole situation,” Trump said, denying that Israel had given him advance notice. “I was very unhappy about it, very unhappy about every aspect of it,” he continued. “We’ve got to get the hostages back. But I was very unhappy with the way that went down.”

keep readingShow less
Europe Ukraine
Top image credit: German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, Volodymyr Zelenskyi, President of Ukraine, Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of the UK, and Donald Tusk, Prime Minister of Poland, emerge from St. Mary's Palace for a press conference as part of the Coalition of the Willing meeting in Kiev, May 10 2025, Kay Nietfeld/dpa via Reuters Connect

Is Europe deliberately sabotaging Ukraine War negotiations?

Europe

After last week’s meeting of the “coalition of the willing” in Paris, 26 countries have supposedly agreed to contribute — in some fashion — to a military force that would be deployed on Ukrainian soil after hostilities have concluded.

Three weeks prior, at the Anchorage leaders’ summit press conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin noted that Ukraine’s security should be ensured as part of any negotiated settlement. But Russian officials have continued to reiterate that this cannot take the form of Western combat forces stationed in Ukraine. In the wake of last week’s meeting, Putin has upped the ante by declaring that any such troops would be legitimate targets for the Russian military.

keep readingShow less

LATEST

QIOSK

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.