The difficult alliance... China and the Taliban in the face of ISIS-Khorasan

A few days before the start of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi received Abdul Ghani Barader, a leader of the Afghan Taliban movement, in the Chinese city of Tianjin, adjacent to the capital, Beijing, and took a semi-official photo together before To start talks between the two parties (1).

In conjunction with the Taliban's desire to acquire international legitimacy from the heavier countries regionally and internationally, and against the backdrop of the escalating tension between the United States and China, Beijing decided to take advantage of the chaos of the American and Western withdrawal from Afghanistan to score some points.

The first is a point on the geopolitical level with the possession of a new ally with whom it shares an international border that extends for a length of 76 kilometers, which are short but key borders; It separates the far east of Afghanistan from the far west of China, and at the same time connects Pakistani Kashmir and Tajikistan, and thus makes Kabul for China a pivotal player in the Belt and Road Initiative if Beijing wants the initiative to reach West Asia successfully, and also makes it an important card In strengthening the anti-India Sino-Pakistani alliance, especially given the already known and existing alliance between the Taliban and Pakistan, which ultimately strengthens China's regional-Asian position (in the face of its Indian rival), as well as its international position (in the face of the United States).

The second point is in terms of fighting armed groups supporting the Muslim Uyghur cause, as the strong relationship with the Taliban means the presence of an important partner adjacent to the Chinese state of “Xinjiang” (East Turkestan), and well-versed in the map of Islamic groups in Central Asia, which means its ability to provide China with information Much in its ongoing conflict with the Uyghur groups. The third is an economic paper by opening the door to Chinese commercial influence in the most populous country in Central Asia (about 40 million people, or more than a third of the region’s population), especially since the success of the Taliban - with the help of Chinese investments - in bringing a kind of stability and development inside Afghanistan will be considered a point. Strong in favor of China's propaganda of its development model, given the repeated failure of the West to make any progress in this file in Afghanistan.

Confident in the possibility of achieving these points, Wang stated against the background of his meeting with Barader last July that the withdrawal of the United States and NATO “exposes the failure of American policies, and gives the Afghan people an important opportunity to achieve stability and development in their country.” He then added that China respects the independence of Afghanistan, and that it It does not interfere in its internal affairs (2), in an implicit reference to what distinguishes - up to this moment - China's foreign policy compared to Washington, which is its farness from exporting certain political or administrative patterns to the surrounding countries, in contrast to the political agenda of its long-standing American rival in spreading Democracy and human rights ideas. Therefore, it seems that the agenda of good-neighbourliness and investment, free of political fat, has begun to attract various countries, ranging from the military regime in Myanmar to the Taliban movement in Kabul.

However, the weaving of an alliance between an international pole, such as China, emerged from the folds of a high-caliber communist revolutionary experience (and on its ruins at the same time), and an Islamic movement with a tribal and ethnic dimension that has not completely settled in a country that has barely experienced political stability and economic growth for over a period of time. four decades, and it has not yet entered the phase of the modern state in its comprehensive sense;

It will be very difficult, contrary to what the two sides think, difficulties that are already beginning to reveal themselves inside Afghanistan.

jihad vacuum

On the eighth of last October, the pillars of a mosque belonging to the Shiite minority (Hazara) in the Afghan province of Kunduz shook due to an explosion carried out by the “Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISK)” that left more than seventy victims behind. The organization quickly claimed responsibility in a statement posted on the Internet, and even explicitly mentioned the name of the executor of the operation, "Muhammad al-Uyguri," adding that the attack targeted the "Rafidites" (referring to the Shiites), as well as the Taliban government because of its intention to deport the Uyghurs from Afghanistan in response to demands from Afghanistan. China so. The Diplomat website indicated that this is the first time that the organization has declared the identity of a Uyghur person who participated in its operations (3).

Of course, the statement is not absurd, as the Uyghur file in particular popped up in the organization’s propaganda to attract new “mujahideen” from the vacuum left by the Taliban after their rise to power, and their continuous adaptation to the transformation from an armed group to a ruling regime, a transformation that seems important to it and its new international allies. However, it is a difficult and dangerous transformation for the Islamic movement after many years of sowing the seeds of global jihad in the Afghan arena, and its dangers are manifested on several levels.

First, at the tactical level, the Taliban knows very well how to disturb the sleep of the central authorities and disrupt the course of life in major cities, as they have been practicing for more than two decades in those methods that the Americans have suffered during their occupation of Afghanistan, but with their transfer to the square of power, they suffer today from a great helplessness in the face of those who pursued these methods As Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Sami Sahak and Timur Shah wrote in the New York Times, ISIS-K was able to exploit the Taliban’s inability to protect cities, crowded buildings, and large human gatherings to intensify its attacks over the course of the current year. 4). The most prominent and most difficult attack came a few days ago, when the organization targeted the Sardar Muhammad Dawood Khan Military Hospital in the capital, Kabul, with a suicide bombing and an attack led by gunmen.

“The Western-backed government has dealt with these incidents using its own forces, who are mostly backed by NATO special operations forces on the ground… (As for) the Taliban, they have little support and experience when it comes to incidents like this,” the newspaper’s three Afghan correspondents noted, noting Considering that government soldiers who fought the Taliban and Taliban fighters were both wounded in the attack, they were quickly distributed to hospital beds for treatment, while their colleagues waited abroad to check on their condition (4).

Secondly, on the political and social level, the Taliban does not adopt modern, hard methods in organizing its ranks, but rather has consistently relied on a mixture of jihadist-populist propaganda to mobilize young people from the tribes and rural areas to fight with them and swear allegiance to them, and its strong authority in Afghanistan was formed through the acceptance of its Islamic ideology by large sectors, and raised the banner of jihad against the West, but at the present moment, the loose nature of the movement as an umbrella of fighters, not a solid organization, began to reveal its weaknesses after the shifts in its discourse and diplomatic response with the West at one time and with Russia and China at another time, which means that there is a “vacuum.” Jihadist" will soon find someone to fill it in the shadow of the decentralized social fabric of Afghanistan, which is wide open to jihadist discourses.

Between Kabul and Beijing

On the twenty-sixth of last October, Taliban officials sat with their counterparts from China in the corridors of the Qatari capital, Doha, to discuss a number of important files for the two parties, but news of the meeting soon reached social media, as Lukas Weber wrote. For the Eurasia Net website, the supporters of ISIS-Khorasan grabbed the tip of the line and launched a campaign via the Telegram application in which they accused the Taliban of being “prostitutes” for China, and published a video of Amir Khan Muttaki, the Taliban’s foreign minister, offering nuts Pines to his Chinese counterpart Wang during the meeting, accusing the movement of betraying the Muslims of China (5).

Acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi presents pine nuts to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Doha.

#ArianaNews #IEA #China #Doha pic.twitter.com/PrEcFdc7ML

— Ariana News (@ArianaNews_) October 26, 2021

The presence of the Uyghurs in Afghanistan is not the result of yesterday. The first waves of their exodus from China began during the fifties of the twentieth century due to the repressive policies of the Communist Party at the time, and their paths were divided between those who chose Europe and the United States, and those who chose Turkey because of their common cultural roots, but some did not ally with them. Luck only crossed the Chinese border, and then hundreds of Uyghur families landed in Afghanistan in the early sixties, especially since Afghanistan was a country familiar to many of them due to the long centuries of trade and pilgrimage caravans that passed through its mountains from China to the Middle East (6).

There are more than a hundred Uyghur families inside Afghanistan today, and their number is estimated at about two thousand people, and while most of them adhere to the Islamic religion without embracing any extremist ideologies, few of them see jihadist affiliation as a refuge, especially with the increase in repressive campaigns against them inside China, and their fear of practicing The Taliban government to suppress or deport them after years of assimilation by the US-backed Afghan government until its fall (7). Paradoxically, these are the same reasons that push a small number of Uyghurs in the al-Hol camp on the Syrian-Iraqi border to cling to the ideas of ISIS, on the grounds that the accusation of extremism will prolong their stay in the captivity of the Syrian Democratic Forces and have mercy on them from more cruel families if they are deported to China.

Since the doors of diplomacy between Beijing and Kabul opened, the Uyghurs in Afghanistan sensed their critical situation, and panic spread among ordinary Uyghurs at the hard-line grip of the Taliban at times, and the prospects of deportation at other times. According to the BBC, a number of Uyghurs in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif are reluctant to go to Kabul and fly to another country, fearing that Taliban checkpoints will stop them because of their identity cards (7).

This panic among the Uyghurs is, of course, a gift on a golden platter for ISIS-Khorasan, which has recently intensified its propaganda campaigns to attract fighters from them, and to shake the confidence of hardened fighters in general in the Taliban and its "soft" policies toward Islamic issues.

Evidence for this is the Kunduz operation, which was orchestrated by Uyghur militants who previously worked under the Taliban umbrella before they got out of it. Khorasan", in protest of its openness to Beijing and Moscow, as well as to some authoritarian Central Asian countries, such as Uzbekistan, which has a long history of suppressing Islamic movements (8).

The Uyghur Dilemma

In the midst of its quest to reformulate governance in Afghanistan, the Taliban finds itself face to face with challenges in order to create a balance between the need for stability and the provision of economic resources by various means to a significant segment of Afghans, while managing a minimum of normal diplomatic relations with regional and international parties, without compromising on Much of the content of its Islamic ideology, which is still the mainstay of its legitimacy. However, the Taliban faces - paradoxically - the dilemma of dealing with the social fabric incubating the jihadist movements that had the lion's share in their industry, and which has recently become the main gateway to the "ISIS-Khorasan" organization.

ISIS-Khorasan threatens not only the political and economic project of the Taliban, but also the ranks of the movement itself, which are soft ranks on the ground that were united only by the ideological banner of jihad and a fragile economic-financial machine full of its contradictions as well. In this regard, the Institute for the Study of War reported in its analysis at the end of last October that there were groups of fighters that emerged from the womb of the Taliban and joined the “ISIS-Khorasan” banner, and indicated that fighters previously associated with the dissident Taliban leader, “Mullah Abdul Mannan.” Niazi" in Herat joined the organization, which caused a round of fighting between the two parties in the city recently, adding that the Taliban's attempts to relative openness to its former enemies may serve to attract more hardened fighters in its ranks to ISIS-Khorasan (9) .

As the Islamic movement moves from the solid square of jihad to the difficult square of governance for it, it will take a long time to build a new state and economy, a time that works in the interest of ISIS-Khorasan's violent machine, which has been operating with unparalleled efficiency since the withdrawal of the United States And it may succeed in replacing the Taliban's jihad machine if the Taliban focuses too much on the equation of governance and diplomacy at the expense of its Islamic legitimacy at home.

The Taliban’s choice to sacrifice the Uyghurs seems pragmatic and logical compared to winning an important international ally such as China that can offer much politically and economically, but the Uyghurs in Afghanistan are not just refugees or guests, and if the sacrifice of the Uyghurs would open the door to reducing the Taliban’s legitimacy at home, destabilizing the ranks of the movement and undermining stability In Afghanistan, the choice between Beijing and the Uyghurs will become more difficult and complex, and the Taliban may be retreating from it relatively to protect their grip at home.

Only days will reveal the extent of the Taliban’s success or not in managing these difficult choices, as the dilemma of searching for that “hair” between legitimacy at home and abroad reaches its most difficult when it comes to the relationship with China and the Uyghur file.

On the part of Beijing, Afghanistan represents a difficult test for China's foreign policy, whose developmental formula without politics has long succeeded. Most likely, Beijing will have to face the complexities of politics in the end after decades of being sidelined in favor of economics in its diplomacy, and it will have to face difficult and heavy choices. The same ones that were carried by the major powers before them, especially in Afghanistan, and especially at a moment when they actually started looking for a more prominent political and military role, at least in Asia.

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