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Hugo Jones

Lukas Fiala

August 20th, 2021

Why Afghanistan Isn’t Taiwan

0 comments

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Hugo Jones

Lukas Fiala

August 20th, 2021

Why Afghanistan Isn’t Taiwan

0 comments

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

This was published by the China Global South Project on 20 August 2021. China Foresight is affiliated with the China Global South Project and regularly provides opinion pieces for the weekly IDEAS China Global South newsletter. Click here to subscribe to the newsletter.

 

This week the world watched in real-time the Afghan government collapse, the Taliban’s rapid capture of Kabul, and scenes of abandonment at the capital’s airport. Afghans clinging on to a U.S. Air Force plane in a desperate bid to flee the country as the Taliban proclaimed the Islamic Caliphate of Afghanistan, painfully remind us of the limits of liberal internationalism. While the West ponders over what went wrong, why costly military assistance did not have the desired effect, millions of Afghans fear for their lives and future in a repressive, Taliban-led regime.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a spate of provocative narratives emerged about how America’s withdrawal relates to China’s future as a global power. Many of these are misleading or downright ignorant. But some have been taken more seriously than others: the idea that China will fill the power vacuum left by the U.S. in Afghanistan; and if the U.S. can’t maintain a position in Afghanistan, then a ‘withdrawal’ from Taiwan may be next. Are these conclusions which we can (and should) accurately draw?

Let’s tackle each one in turn. China was certainly one of the first countries to indicate that it would recognize the Taliban as the new government of Afghanistan. In a phone call with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi scolded America’s record of ‘mechanically copying foreign models’ in historically and culturally different settings. Chinese political figures, state media, and diplomats have used this opportunity to publicly shame the U.S.’ record of ‘arbitrarily interfering in other countries’ internal affairs’. They argue that the botched nation-building project in Afghanistan distinguishes the colonial West from peaceful China. Sounds like a great power play – but really it isn’t.

In 2002 China tacitly supported the ‘War on Terror,’ and instrumentalized the political discourse of combatting extremism to reinforce the ‘Three Evils’, which continue to inform and justify policy in Xinjiang today. Indeed, China is worried about the potential for Uyghur separatist organizations to germinate within Afghanistan and has sought assurances from the Taliban that this will not become a problem. While Beijing may offer its ultimate carrot – financial firepower – to extract favours from the Taliban leadership by aiding Afghanistan’s dire economic situation, it’s not an easy win for Beijing: neighbouring Pakistan is a linchpin of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Beijing has much to lose both in terms of investments and political capital.

The last thing Beijing wants is a very public security incident that demands a heavy-handed response, which, if the history of external interference in Afghanistan is anything to go by, would be doomed to failure. How Beijing navigates difficult security concerns around Afghanistan will be a bellwether for its overseas security strategy elsewhere. In short, the situation in Afghanistan is certainly not a clear win but rather a headache for a stability-seeking China.

The withdrawal from Afghanistan is also more complex for China than simply an analogue for Taiwan. Indeed, the argument that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the admittedly unprepared response to the Taliban take-over is bad news for Taipei because it signals that Washington only provides security if an issue falls within the remit of national interests, is logically flawed.

Countering China is, by far, the most coherent objective of the Biden administration. Taiwan and cross-strait relations more generally, are a key objective of U.S. foreign policy. If the situation in Afghanistan should mean anything to policymakers in Taiwan, it’s that the U.S. increasingly prioritizes its overseas security posture in favour of East Asia. To argue that waning U.S. interests in protecting the Afghan government from the Taliban has direct implications for Taiwan is to misunderstand the actual argument. After all, these exact interests have led to a shift in US foreign policy towards the Asia-Pacific and thus Taiwan in the first place.

China is thus neither likely to benefit from the supposed “power vacuum” in Afghanistan, nor should Afghanistan be interpreted as a straightforward reference to assess U.S. commitments towards Taiwan. To do so also disregards the very real humanitarian crisis which is still occurring on the ground in Afghanistan, in an attempt to transplant the geopolitical significance elsewhere.

Instead, we should avoid framing events of political importance in the Global South as a subset of U.S.-China competition. It is exactly this kind of simplified thinking that has led the West to reproduce their own foreign policy disasters in the past by failing to appreciate the complexity of regional and local politics and histories.


This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the China Foresight Forum, LSE IDEAS, nor The London School of Economics and Political Science.

The blog image, “Taliban poseren in het presidentieel paleis op 15 augustus 2021, live op de nieuwszender Al Jazeera“, is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

About the author

Hugo Jones

Hugo Jones is a programme and research associate at LSE IDEAS, The London School of Economics’ foreign policy think tank. He holds an MSc in International Relations from LSE.

Lukas Fiala

Lukas Fiala is a PhD candidate in International Relations at The London School of Economics and the Project Coordinator of China Foresight at LSE IDEAS, LSE’s foreign policy think tank. Previously he was a Yenching Scholar at Peking University.

Posted In: China Global South Project

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