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
Kim Jong Un
Top photo credit: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visits the construction site of the Ragwon County Offshore Farm, North Korea July 13, 2025. KCNA via REUTERS

Kim Jong Un is nuking up and playing hard to get

Asia-Pacific

President Donald Trump’s second term has so far been a series of “shock and awe” campaigns both at home and abroad. But so far has left North Korea untouched even as it arms for the future.

The president dramatically broke with precedent during his first term, holding two summits as well as a brief meeting at the Demilitarized Zone with the North’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. Unfortunately, engagement crashed and burned in Hanoi. The DPRK then pulled back, essentially severing contact with both the U.S. and South Korea.

keep readingShow less
Why new CENTCOM chief Brad Cooper is as wrong as the old one
Top photo credit: U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Brad Cooper speaks to guests at the IISS Manama Dialogue in Manama, Bahrain, November 17, 2023. REUTERS/Hamad I Mohammed

Why new CENTCOM chief Brad Cooper is as wrong as the old one

Middle East

If accounts of President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Iranian nuclear facilities this past month are to be believed, the president’s initial impulse to stay out of the Israel-Iran conflict failed to survive the prodding of hawkish advisers, chiefly U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) chief Michael Kurilla.

With Kurilla, an Iran hawk and staunch ally of both the Israeli government and erstwhile national security adviser Mike Waltz, set to leave office this summer, advocates of a more restrained foreign policy may understandably feel like they are out of the woods.

keep readingShow less
Putin Trump
Top photo credit: Vladimir Putin (Office of the President of the Russian Federation) and Donald Trump (US Southern Command photo)

How Trump's 50-day deadline threat against Putin will backfire

Europe

In the first six months of his second term, President Donald Trump has demonstrated his love for three things: deals, tariffs, and ultimatums.

He got to combine these passions during his Oval Office meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on Monday. Only moments after the two leaders announced a new plan to get military aid to Ukraine, Trump issued an ominous 50-day deadline for Russian President Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire. “We're going to be doing secondary tariffs if we don't have a deal within 50 days,” Trump told the assembled reporters.

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.