China, Afghanistan and an American Exit

By Steve Hynd

The new December issue of Pragati, the Indian national interest review, is out - and I've a short piece in it summarizing some thoughts I've been blogging about on a possible Chinese role in Afghanistan. There have been several signals from China that, should the United States withdraw military forces, China would help facilitate “deployment of international peacekeeping missions in its land and accelerating its reconstruction process.”

With China having a hold of all the important economic and military levers on the sub-continent, being able to economically strong-arm Afghanistan, Pakistan and to a lesser extent India, a UN peacekeeping force becomes much more possible politically.

There is a fair bit to like in such a plan, for almost all concerned. The US and its Western allies get out of a quagmire intact, China gets resources and the chance to act like a superpower. Russia gets regional stability, the other SCO nations get increased trade and the opportunity to act beneficially on the world stage. Pakistan gets strategic depth and the Afghan Taliban probably get some kind of power-sharing reconciliation with Karzai.

The main losers would be al-Qaida, Pakistan-based jihadi groups and India. The latter would need some pretty big economic carrots from China and the United States to swallow losing short-term influence in Afghanistan to its northern rival. But India would benefit too from removal of Pakistan’s reasons to use proxies, and in the longer term, from the chance to grow into the superpower it should be without having to waste energy on Pakistan or China for at least a couple of decades.

I'm not the only one who has been thinking that way. Colonel Matthew Hall, former chief analyst for Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan, argues that NATO should provide China with a chance to further its international standing and position in the region by encouraging it to take an active role (PDF). The Obama administration should have consulted him while contemplating its escalation, probably didn't, and should now remedy that.