Kabul’s New Patron?

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When Afghan President Hamid Karzai visited China last month, his hosts pulled out all the stops. During his three days in Beijing, Karzai met not only with Chinese President Hu Jintao but also with Premier Wen Jiabao and the Politburo Standing Committee member Wu Bangguo. Karzai signed agreements with Chinese leaders on economic cooperation, technical training, and preferential tariffs for Afghan exports.

It was Karzai's fourth trip to China as Afghanistan's president and the latest sign that, as Washington shows its impatience with the Karzai regime (pressuring it, for example, on electoral reform), Kabul is beginning to look for new supporters and patrons. As the regional hegemon, China is the obvious choice. Successfully courting Beijing, Kabul reasons, could yield benefits in terms of trade, economic assistance, and even military training.

The interest appears to be mutual. With U.S. President Barack Obama having set a deadline of July 2011 to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, China is increasingly aware that it will soon have a pivotal role in Afghanistan's security and that of the whole region.

China's interests in Afghanistan are twofold: security and trade. Afghanistan remains a source of instability to China's west, particularly as it abuts the restless Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Concerns about Islamist militancy on its western border have only heightened since the Uighur riots of July 2009 and are likely to increase as the United States withdraws. The Turkistan Islamic Party (formerly the East Turkistan Islamic Movement), which Beijing often blames for attacks within China, is based in Afghanistan and the borderlands of Pakistan. In September 2003, Hasan Mahsum, then the TIP's leader, was killed in South Waziristan by Pakistani security forces supported by Chinese intelligence officers. In February, a U.S. drone strike killed Abdul Haq al-Turkistani, the TIP's most recent leader, in North Waziristan.

As the United States begins its military withdrawal and such drone strikes become less frequent, China worries that the TIP will gain greater freedom of movement. Even if the group remains unable to launch cross-border operations into Xinjiang, the TIP's mere existence in Afghanistan and Pakistan (coupled with its increasing use of Uighur-language militant propaganda on the Internet) will continue to be a serious concern for China.

The reduced international presence in Afghanistan may also allow the heroin trade to continue unchecked. (Opium cultivation grew exponentially after the fall of the Taliban in 2001 but has decreased in the last year due to the U.S. troop surge. Questions remain, however, over whether this downward trend will hold as the Western presence in the country begins to shrink in the next couple of years.) In 2007, according to Li Xianhui, the director of drug prevention in China's Ministry of Public Security, 386 kilograms of heroin were smuggled into China from the so-called Golden Crescent of Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan, a total that exceeds the cumulative figure for 2001 to 2004.

These various threats are not likely to result in the deployment of Chinese troops in combat missions or protective roles, since the Chinese government is well aware that if it were to base troops overseas unilaterally -- even in a humanitarian role -- alarm bells about a neo-imperial Chinese foreign policy would go off in capitals such as New Delhi and Tokyo.

But China has an active interest in ensuring that the Afghan military is effectively able to guard the border separating the two countries. This goal was underlined by the meeting in March between Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak and Chinese Minister of National Defense Liang Guanglie. China's Defense Ministry pledged to continue its low-key support of Afghan forces in the form of military supply and personnel training. Both governments aim to bolster the capabilities of Afghanistan's national army and police so that, in the words of Wardak, they will be "strong enough to defend the country against internal and external threats" in a post-NATO future.

Trade and development assistance form an even larger part of the burgeoning Afghan-Chinese relationship. Although the Afghan economy accounts for just one-tenth of one percent of China's overall trade portfolio, the possibility of cheap resources on its border is of significant interest to Beijing. China has already made the largest single foreign direct investment in Afghanistan: $3.5 billion in the Aynak copper field in Logar province. Under the terms of the deal, signed in May 2008, China will also build a 400-megawatt coal-fired power plant, a freight railway running from the XUAR through Tajikistan to Afghanistan, a hospital, and a mosque.

Such agreements also meet a secondary need for China: developing its western regions. Despite the ethnic violence last July -- or perhaps because of it -- Beijing has redoubled its efforts to boost the economies of its two western provinces, the XUAR and the Tibet Autonomous Region, which also recently witnessed ethnic riots in 2008. In March, Hu said that development of the western region is a priority of China's twelfth Five-Year Plan, which will run from 2011 to 2015.