by Andrew Small
In their discussions, Lu raised China’s concerns about “rumours that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was allegedly assisting the Muslims in Xinjiang”.97 Mullah Omar assured the Chinese ambassador that “Afghanistan never had any interest or wish to interfere in China’s domestic issues and affairs, nor would Afghanistan allow any group to use its territory to conduct any such operations or support one to that end.”98 Both sides emerged from the meeting only partially satisfied. The Taliban’s leadership had hoped that China might be helpful in fending off a new set of UN sanctions, which included the imposition of an arms embargo, travel bans, a prohibition of flights from Afghanistan, and the mandatory closure of the Taliban’s overseas offices. Beijing did not veto the resolution, but, instead of supporting it, as it had the unanimously approved sanctions of 1999, made a point of abstaining, expressing concern “that the Afghan people would suffer from the measures proposed in the resolution”.99 Even more importantly, China gave the go-ahead for a set of commercial interactions that would help mitigate the sanctions’ impact. Huawei and ZTE were believed to have agreed to provide a limited phone service in Afghanistan, ZTE signing a contract to install 5,000 phone lines in Kabul, and Huawei to install 12,000 lines in Kandahar.100 Chinese companies, such as Dongfeng Agricultural Machinery Company, began repairs to Afghanistan’s power grid, fixing dams in Kandahar, Helmand and Nangarhar. For their part, the Taliban “ordered the East Turkistan group to cease their attacks against China”.101 While in practice this only seemed to result in their having to join IMU camps instead of operating their own independent camps, the distinction was not without consequence—the Uighurs were not expelled from Afghanistan, but they were effectively subsumed into the activities of the Central Asian groups rather than being given the freedom to pursue a China-centric agenda.102
The prize that the Taliban and their Pakistani sponsors really craved from Beijing was diplomatic recognition, and, despite Afghanistan’s increasingly pariah-like status, the possibility of granting it was at least under consideration. China’s formal stance was that it would not make a decision until the UN’s position had been determined, but its growing diplomatic and economic engagement in Afghanistan was taking things in a clear direction. Relations experienced a setback, however, with the destruction of the large 8th century Buddha statues in Bamiyan. China, along with Japan and Sri Lanka, was later described by Taliban officials as being one of the most active states in lobbying against the spectacular act of cultural vandalism once the plans were made public.103 When a Taliban commercial delegation arrived in China a couple of months after the dynamiting of the statues, they found that all of their official meetings with the Chinese government had been refused.104 Although the threads between the two sides were picked up again, many of the plans were destined never to come to fruition. A Chinese delegation visited Kabul later that year to ink an MOU spelling out plans to upgrade economic and technical cooperation, which was signed by Mullah Mohammad Issa Akhund, the Taliban’s Minister of Mines and Industries. The announcement of the deal came on 11 September 2001.105
Jiang Zemin, the Chinese president, watched the 9/11 attacks on Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong network—CCTV, the state broadcaster, was not running the news story. He called other Chinese officials and told them to turn their televisions on. Within two hours, he had placed a call to President George W. Bush to express condolences and pledge China’s support.106 This was not just rhetoric. China offered intelligence support and even a form of military assistance, in the form of minesweepers, as the United States prepared to invade Afghanistan.107 The FBI was allowed to set up an office in Beijing.108 Terrorist financing intelligence was shared.109 The Chinese embassy in Washington also informed the Pentagon that it could call on the services of the man who “knew the location of every arms cache in Northern Afghanistan and a lot else besides”: Chen Xiaogong, who had run Chinese intelligence operations in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and was now serving as military attaché.110 Chen’s advice and the minesweepers were both rebuffed by the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who was barely minded to involve traditional US allies in the invasion, let alone the Chinese military.111
Whether or not the United States took up the offers didn’t much matter to China. The pledges of assistance served the dual purpose of securing US acquiescence to its stance on domestic terrorism issues, and shoring up ties with Washington at precisely the moment when many in Beijing believed strategic competition between the two sides was about to escalate.112 In this respect, 9/11 was a relief to a Chinese government that now saw the United States training its sights on the greater Middle East rather than the Asia-Pacific. Nonetheless, China was concerned by the escalating US military presence in its neighbourhood. All of a sudden, an arc of countries near China’s western border that had been seen as peripheral to US interests became the locations of new military bases and supply routes. And nowhere was this shift more concerning, and more sudden, than in Pakistan.
Within two days of the 9/11 attacks, the United States had delivered to Pakistan not only a “with us or against us” ultimatum, but a specific list of demands, which ranged from a break in relations with the Taliban to an extensive package of military and intelligence cooperation.113 The decision on whether to accept the bulk of Washington’s requests needed to be reached quickly by Musharraf, and it was. While restricting the scope of certain elements—such as overflight rights—and questioning others, the answer from Islamabad was a slightly qualified “yes”. China had to play catch-up on what exactly was going on. As a Pakistani observer of the relationship noted: “There was no consultation with China. Usually there would be a mechanism for consultation with China on issues of such significance but Musharraf took the decision in a very short space of time.”114 As a result, within barely a week of the 9/11 attacks, Jiang Zemin dispatched Wang Yi to Islamabad as a special envoy to gauge the scope of Pakistan’s security cooperation with the United States and to gain some assurances.115
Wang was China’s youngest deputy minister, a former visiting scholar at Georgetown University and a career Asia specialist who would go on to handle some of the country’s trickiest portfolios—Japan and Taiwan—before being appointed as China’s foreign minister. This was an equally delicate assignment. The visit has been portrayed in some accounts as China “shoring up Pakistan’s support for the US effort.”116 While in one sense this is true—Beijing certainly did not think that Pakistan should get itself “bombed back to the Stone Age” by the United States, as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was supposed to have threatened117—China also wanted to ensure that its interests in the region were not harmed, and was not entirely comfortable with what was envisaged in the new terms of the US-Pakistan relationship. Intelligence cooperation in dealing with Al Qaeda was one thing, US bases in Pakistan, overflight rights, and land supply routes were quite another. Wang made sure that he had “clarified the Pakistani position that under no circumstances would Pakistan allow its cooperation with the U.S. to undermine Chinese strategic interests”.118 He raised the suggestion that Pakistan could put forward a timeframe for the United States to leave Afghanistan. He also began what would be a longer-running conversation, in which Beijing asked that Pakistan give China the same opportunities to establish intelligence-gathering capabilities in the country as the Americans, whether it came to signals or human intelligence.119 On 2 October the Chinese government released details of a phone call between Jiang and Musharraf, quoting Jiang as stressing that “the fight against terrorism should have concrete evidence and specific objectives. It should also abide by the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and the recognized norms of the international law.”120 It reflected China’s apprehension and ambivalence over US activities in the region that would recede only a decade later when it believed that the United States was finally on its way out.
In Afghanistan itself, during the early, relatively peaceful years after the invasion, China picked up where it had left off on September 11, 2
001. The Pakistani ambassador to China at the time later described a “sense of relief” in Beijing at the Taliban’s ousting.121 ZTE and Huawei were back to set up digital telephone services, providing 200,000 subscriber lines to the country.122 ZTE later won a major contract to construct a national fibre-optic cable network.123 Chinese construction companies such as China Railway Shisiju Group got to work on the rebuilding of the Kabul-Jalalabad road124 and sections of the ring road in Faryab province.125 Chinese companies took on the repair of hospitals in Kabul126 and Kandahar,127 the latter of which the Chinese had built in the 1970s, and returned to the Parwan irrigation project that they had first established in the 1960s.128 Two Chinese lions were sent to Kabul zoo in 2002129 to replace what had once been its main attraction, Marjan the lion, who had survived coups, the Soviet invasion, the civil war and the Taliban.130 A less wholesome trade also sprang up in Kabul—large numbers of Chinese “restaurants”, most of which were barely-concealed brothels.131 The overall scale of China’s economic presence was still modest but it was diverse and growing, and by the time the enormous Aynak copper mine project had been announced, China was on track to become Afghanistan’s largest investor. On diplomatic and security matters it kept its head down—but few noticed or expected much more of it. After all, Afghanistan was not supposed to be a conflict zone any more.
By 2006, the Taliban had comprehensively regrouped. During the US invasion, thousands of fighters slipped across the border with Pakistan and melted back into the parts of the country that had once been their homes in the 1980s and 1990s—Balochistan, the North-West Frontier Province and FATA.132 Mullah Omar himself had left Afghanistan for Quetta in 2002, where he stayed at guest-houses run by the JUI, which ran the provincial coalition government.133 The Balochi city became the Taliban’s unofficial capital. A leadership group in exile was formed and the process of rearming, reorganizing, recruiting and fundraising was quickly underway, with the support of the ISI.134 By 2003, the Taliban were launching guerrilla attacks in Afghanistan again.135 By 2004, the greater parts of several southern provinces were already considered to be under Taliban control.136 And by 2006, the take-off of suicide bombings, IED usage, outright Taliban military offensives, and escalating numbers of civilian and coalition casualties marked a country that had unambiguously been plunged back into war again.137
China’s reaction to these developments was a mix of caution, ambivalence, and hedging. On the one hand, it did not want to see a return to the late 1990s, with parts of Afghanistan turning into a safe haven for ETIM again. On the other hand, it didn’t want to see a US victory in the country either, with the risk of a long-term military presence on China’s borders and a staunchly pro-Western government in Kabul. Its preferred outcome—a politically independent, autonomous and stable Afghanistan that was not run by religious extremists—was not on the table. In 2005, China had made the closest thing to a public demand for an end to the US military presence in the region as a whole when it joined a statement from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) calling for a timetable for the closure of US bases in Central Asia.138 The US facilities at Karshi-Khanabad in Uzbekistan and Manas in Kyrgyzstan had become the subject of controversy after the “Tulip Revolution” toppled the Akayev regime in the latter country. When the United States supported the extradition of refugees who had fled the Andijon massacre in Uzbekistan, the furious Uzbek president, Islam Karimov, fearing that he might be next, shut down the K2 base and pushed the SCO to issue its statement.139 From China’s perspective, the growing Western presence in the region started to look like an arm of the democracy-promotion agenda that it feared, the so-called “colour revolutions”, which had now crept towards China’s borders. In Afghanistan, Beijing watched like a hawk to see whether the US bases being built in the country foreshadowed a permanent presence, and took particular note of any military activities in Badakhshan or Nuristan province that might be too close to its territory for comfort.140
Outright backing for the Taliban was out of the question for China, but so was outright backing for the Americans. This was a war in which Beijing wanted neither side to win, and neither side to blame Beijing for supporting its opponents. The solution was to hedge. China had not broken its contacts with the Taliban since the war, and meetings between the two sides continued, including a visit to Beijing in 2002 from the brother of one of the most powerful Taliban commanders, Jalaluddin Haqqani.141 Even in exile, the pre-9/11 deal that the two sides had reached was useful to both sides, and former Chinese officials claimed in interviews that a mutual understanding was reached that its basic elements should be maintained.142 The Taliban would keep their distance from Uighur militant groups, and China would treat the Taliban as a legitimate political grouping rather than a terrorist outfit, quietly maintaining relations and judiciously separating the language it used when referring to them from the language it used of groups such as Al Qaeda.143 It even supplied them with arms, which prompted diplomatic protests from the United States and the UK after a few too many of them showed up in attacks on their troops.144 The weapons China supplied included HN-5 anti-aircraft missiles, landmines, rocket-propelled grenades, components for roadside bombs, and armour-piercing ammunition.145 Some Chinese arms had been kicking around since the 1980s. Some had found their way to the insurgents via Iran. Others, however, went directly to the Taliban from China, through Pakistan.146 Beijing provided support to Hamid Karzai’s government in Kabul too, but well short of the level that would make the insurgents think that China was backing it too fulsomely. China ranked 23rd on a donor list published in 2009,147 and some of its activities smacked of tokenism: its training of anti-narcotics police was described by one participant as “being taken on a visit to Xinjiang and lectured about China’s reform and opening policy.”148
However, China’s delicate dance with the different political forces operating in Afghanistan faced its most exacting test with the various economic projects that it had set in motion. Some of them attracted controversy for their own reasons. The Chinese work on the highway system—which was publicly criticized by the Afghan finance minister for its slow progress149—was widely seen as poor, and the roads required resurfacing after the companies in question had left.150 At one point there was a rumour that China had been using prison labour to construct the Kabul-Jalalabad road, though it appears that this was just the result of shock among local Afghans about the basic conditions in which the Chinese workers lived.151 In the most egregious instance, a Chinese hospital in Kabul was opened, closed the following day, and never used by a single patient owing to the sheer scale of its construction defects and the lack of resources to run it.152 Even the Chinese brothels were mostly shut down in 2006.153 But the scope of China’s early economic activities was limited, and by the time the insurgency was in full flow, most of them had been wound up. An investment such as the Aynak copper mine, on the other hand, was on a qualitatively different scale; its success or failure would have strategic implications for the government in Kabul, the ISAF stabilization effort, and the broader future of the country. The Taliban’s decision on how to treat these projects had ramifications that went well beyond their relationship with Beijing.
Trying to answer the ostensibly simple question of whether the Taliban were targeting Chinese investments in Afghanistan or laying off them is fraught with complication. In the early years of the insurgency, it appeared that the best way to reach a conclusion was to look at China’s roadbuilding projects, some of which were taking place in parts of the country where the Taliban’s presence was growing. China’s work in the east of the country seemed to proceed remarkably untroubled by militant activity, and gave the Afghan government reason to believe that it might be operating under Taliban—or Pakistani—protection.154 But one incident in 2004 in the northeast of Afghanistan served to illustrate just how muddy that picture was. On 10 June, in the early hours of the morning, a group of twenty assailants gunned down Chinese workers as they slept in their tents, using assault ri
fles, rocket-propelled grenades and hand grenades.155 The construction workers, who were mostly from Shandong, and in many cases had arrived barely two days before the attack, were employed by China Railway Shisiju Group on a World Bank-funded highway project near Kunduz. Eleven of them were killed. It was the deadliest attack on foreigners in the country to date and was initially assumed to be a deliberate Taliban effort to sabotage the government’s reconstruction efforts. Kunduz, although located in a part of the country that was believed to be safe at the time, was rare among northern provinces in having a half-Pashtun population, and various Taliban-affiliated armed groups maintained their reach there even after the invasion.156 It had been the last Taliban holdout in the country after the US invasion, a former IMU stronghold, and the location for the so-called “Airlift of Evil” in November 2001, when the Pakistani air force evacuated hundreds of Taliban commanders, ISI agents, and Al Qaeda and IMU fighters before they could be captured by US forces.157 Yet the Taliban, who had been happy to claim responsibility for the murder of a group of aid workers from Médecins Sans Frontières barely a few days before, rushed to disavow responsibility—“We deny the accusation of killing the Chinese workers in Kunduz province of Afghanistan,” Abdul Latif Hakimi, a spokesman, told the press in a telephone call. The deaths, he said, “should not have happened.”158 The Taliban even organized a demonstration in Takhar, near Kunduz, “to show their support for the Chinese”.159 The Kunduz military commander said that hundreds more people held a demonstration in Kunduz city to “condemn the killing and call on the Chinese company to continue its work repairing the key highway from Kabul to the Tajik border”.160