Chinese Peacemaking Efforts in Afghanistan

China and Conflict Mediation Series

The China and Conflict Mediation series collects eight papers by senior experts on China’s evolving approach to conflict mediation around the world. Presenting case studies from four continents, each chapter examines the drivers, frameworks, and outcomes of China’s efforts to engage in conflict mediation. With analysis drawn from the historic context and current events that influence China’s decision to attempt mediation, this series provides insights into why China is increasingly active in this area, and what it means for China’s role in the international community.

The Chinese efforts at mediation in the Afghan conflicts do not fit easily in any of the usual categories of intrastate or interstate mediation. Of the Chinese efforts at conflict management, peacemaking, or mediation discussed in this series of papers, most involved conflicts between states and nonstate actors, including Ethiopia, South Sudan, Yemen, Mali/Sahel, and terrorism in Africa. A smaller number involved conflicts between states, such as U.S.-North Korea, and Saudi Arabia-Iran. In at least one case in Africa (Ethiopia), China has responded to a domestic conflict (Ethiopia/Tigre) by convening an interstate meeting. The latter cases — interstate conflicts — are more within China’s comfort zone, as involvement does not lead to interference in another state’s internal affairs. While China had significant interests in the regions affected by all these conflicts, it had direct security concerns only in U.S.–North Korea, North Korea being a state whose very birth depended on Chinese military intervention.

Afghanistan has experienced a much longer and more complex conflict than any of these and also has had a more direct impact on China than any except North Korea. Given Chinese concern about Uyghur Islamic and separatist militants, policy toward Afghanistan has been almost an extension of Chinese domestic politics. China has also been interested in tapping Afghanistan’s natural resources (lithium, coal, iron, copper, oil, and gas). Insecurity and conflict in Afghanistan has threatened the security of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), in particular the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, whereas a secure Afghanistan has the potential to enable China to make the BRI more extensive and coherent.

Afghanistan’s wars have spanned the categories of interstate, intrastate, regional, and great-power conflicts. The country went through a multistage armed conflict over more than four decades involving multiple nonstate actors, multiple Afghan governments, and Afghanistan’s neighbors, especially Pakistan. Every major world power and every major Muslim country, including both Saudi Arabia and Iran, has been involved, sometimes in multiple roles over time. During the 40-plus years of the conflict, China’s global status and roles changed fundamentally, and its relationship to Pakistan turned into what is arguably China’s closest relationship with any state.

The Afghan conflict was made even more complex by the use of incompletely controlled proxies. Part of the conflict was over which parties were in conflict. The negotiations over the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan included proximity talks between Afghanistan and Pakistan, a dialogue between the U.S. and the USSR, and talks with the mujahidin resistance by Pakistan, the U.S., and the USSR. The Afghan government of Dr. Najibullah also held some secret meetings with the mujahidin. Each actor has seen others as puppets of someone else. The United States saw the conflict since 2001 through the lens of the war on terrorism and did not treat it as a political conflict. The Afghan government saw the conflict as one between Afghanistan and Pakistan, with Pakistan providing a safe haven to the Taliban to use them as a proxy to pressure Afghanistan on bilateral issues. Pakistan claimed that the conflict in Afghanistan resulted from the flaws of the U.S. military strategy. The Taliban saw the conflict as primarily between them and the United States.

While China took no position among these alternatives, at various stages China tried to mediate conflicts between Afghanistan and Pakistan and between the Afghan government plus coalition forces and the Taliban. It did so through both confidential and public meetings, bilaterally (with the U.S., Pakistan, and Afghanistan), trilaterally (China-Afghanistan-Pakistan, China-Afghanistan-U.S.), and quadrilaterally. The Quadrilateral Coordination Group (founded at the December 2015 Senior Officials Meeting of the Istanbul Process in Islamabad) included China, the U.S., Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The QCG convened one meeting to which Taliban representatives were also invited.

Chinese Nonintervention and the Legitimacy of State and Governments in Afghanistan

Given the importance of the principle of nonintervention in Chinese discourse about foreign policy, the changes in the degree of international legitimacy accorded to the various entities claiming to be the government of Afghanistan at different periods have affected how China has handled relations with the country.

From 1978 to 1992, the Soviet-supported People’s Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (renamed the Republic of Afghanistan in 1987) held Afghanistan’s seat at the UN, but was regarded as illegitimate by many states, including China, which never appointed an ambassador to that government. From 1992 to 2001, the Islamic State of Afghanistan, composed of various mujahidin groups, held the UN seat, but few countries maintained an embassy in Kabul because of the war raging in the capital and the government’s lack of control of territory and population. China continued not to name an ambassador, but its ties to Pakistan were growing stronger. China’s Afghanistan policy became to some extent an extension of its increasingly important Pakistan policy, though this has never meant that Chinese and Pakistani policies on Afghanistan were completely aligned.

The Islamic State of Afghanistan (the mujahidin government founded in 1992) was ousted from Kabul by the Taliban in September 1996, with the remnants of the Islamic State led by President Burhanuddin Rabbani operating from a sliver of Northern Afghanistan and from Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Pakistan, followed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, recognized the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate in 1997. Saudi Arabia withdrew its diplomats a year later over what it charged was Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s failure to honor an agreement to hand over Osama bin Laden. The UAE had a purely commercial relationship with the Taliban. Iran, Russia, and India supplied the anti-Taliban resistance through Central Asia.

In December 2001, the interim administration that developed into the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan was founded under the auspices of the United Nations in the Bonn negotiations held after the military intervention of the U.S.-led coalition. The Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan was recognized by every state in the world, held Afghanistan’s seat at the UN, and participated in and even helped to found a broad range of multilateral organizations and groups. All major countries, including China, reopened or opened embassies in Kabul and appointed ambassadors. China treated the U.S.-led intervention differently from the Soviet invasion. The latter it had considered a fundamental violation of the principle of nonintervention, while the former it accepted as an act of legitimate (if clumsily executed) self-defense. China also regarded the hostility between Afghanistan and Pakistan as an obstacle to its regional goals.

China’s Transition to a Global Power

The period from 1978 to the present has also included China’s transition from a poor, developing country focused on internal challenges, especially the economy, to a near peer with the U.S. Hence the balance of power in the world, and even more so in the region surrounding landlocked Afghanistan, was transformed, with China moving from being a nonplayer to potentially the leading international player in Afghanistan.

In 2001, China’s GDP was approximately 16% that of the U.S., the same order of magnitude as India’s, and slightly less than half of Russia’s. But that was about to change, and with it, China’s international role, including in Afghanistan. Table 1 shows the GDPs in 1990 (immediately after the USSR withdrew troops from Afghanistan), 2001 (when the U.S. sent troops to Afghanistan), and 2021 (when the U.S. withdrew troops from Afghanistan) of the four actual or potential great powers with stakes in Afghanistan: China, India, the Russian Federation, and the United States. Figure 1 shows the GDPs of China, India, and Russia as percentages of U.S. GDP, a measure of relative power. By 2021, the U.S. GDP was still five times the size of Russia’s. India’s was about twice the size of Russia’s, but China had caught up to and slightly surpassed the U.S. in constant PPP dollars. China’s takeoff began around 1994 and accelerated after 2003. Of course, U.S. GDP per capita remains five times that of China, meaning that the U.S. still has more discretionary income available for foreign adventures. Nonetheless, China, which was a relatively marginal player at the Bonn conference, is now, even if reluctantly, the most active external state in Afghanistan.

Table 1: GDP (PPP) of great powers involved in Afghanistan (in constant 2017 international dollars [billions])

	1990	2001	2021
China	1,616	4,722	24,861
India	1,583	2,856	9,301
Russian Federation	3,179	2,245	4,080
United States	10,097	14,291	20,932

Source: World Bank Data

Figure 1: GDP (PPP) as percentage of U.S. GDP (in constant 2017 international dollars)

Source: World Bank Data

China’s Role in Historical Context 1: The Soviet Intervention

In December 1979, the USSR sent a “limited contingent” of troops to Afghanistan. Its mission was, first, regime change, replacing President Hafizullah Amin (who was killed) with Babrak Karmal; and second, counterinsurgency against the nascent mujahidin groups who were beginning to be armed and funded by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Once the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan, China joined in the effort to support the mujahidin, as it considered the expansion of the Soviet military footprint a security threat. The principle of “noninterference” did not apply to a neighboring country of China invaded by a superpower.

China supported the armed opposition to the Soviets and the government from 1980 to 1989 as part of the U.S.-Pakistan-China triangle begun by Henry Kissinger’s use of Pakistan in 1971 to launch Nixon’s opening to China. In Islamabad, the U.S., Saudi, and Chinese intelligence stations met weekly with the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to coordinate aid to the resistance. China’s role was primarily as a source of Soviet-style weapons, which it had in abundance. Until the U.S.’s 1987 decision to supply the resistance with Stinger laser-guided, shoulder-mounted anti-aircraft missiles, the U.S. and its partners supplied only weapons found in the Soviet arsenal to maintain the fiction of deniability.

The Soviet Union withdrew its troops from Afghanistan on a timetable set by the Geneva Accords of April 14, 1988, signed by Afghanistan and Pakistan, with the U.S. and USSR as guarantors. China played no role in the negotiations. After the withdrawal was completed, on February 15, 1989, China terminated its involvement in the operation to aid the mujahidin, though the U.S. operation against the Soviet-supported government continued through September 1991, when it became evident that the USSR was collapsing.

China’s Role in Historical Context 2: Regional Proxy War

The mujahidin government that took power after the collapse of the Soviet-supported government in April 1992 never consolidated control of the country, as a civil war fueled by regional powers took hold. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia supported Hizb-i Islami and then the Taliban, while Iran, India, and Russia supplied the various groups that eventually formed the United Front, commonly known as the Northern Alliance. China kept its distance, including from Pakistan.

Neither the governments nor the nonstate actors in Afghanistan could have sustained these wars without extensive foreign assistance. Over the course of these 44 years, Afghanistan has become probably the poorest country in the world, while it also became a battleground for the largest militaries in the world, including the USSR, the U.S., and NATO. Until the collapse of the USSR at the end of 1991, Cold War competition motivated the so-called superpowers to fund the war in Afghanistan. Hence the UN-mediated Geneva talks and the subsequent U.S.-Soviet direct negotiations on Afghanistan focused on ending the means used by the Soviets (troop presence and military aid to the government) and the U.S. (military and financial aid to the mujahidin resistance). Interest in and capacity to pursue those objectives collapsed as suddenly as the Soviet Union, whose primary successor state, Russia, no longer bordered Afghanistan.

The war did not end, however. Instead, it soon became a regional proxy war involving Pakistan and Saudi Arabia on one side, and Iran, India, and eventually Russia on the other. Iran and Russia never lost the suspicion that the U.S. was covertly backing its long-time partners, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Motivated by both its competition with India and an existential conflict with Afghanistan, which had lasted since the founding of Pakistan, Islamabad invested what it could in the Taliban, whose discipline, hierarchical organization, and religious credentials ultimately enabled them to make more effective use of the aid they received than previous Pakistan proxies.

During the period of the civil/proxy war in Afghanistan, Pakistan also became a declared nuclear weapons state, in June 1998. India, which had tested a nuclear “device” in 1974, quickly followed suit. By 1998, the Taliban managed to gain control of all of Afghanistan except for a few well-defended areas in the northeast. They did so with aid from retired Pakistani military officers under contract to the ISI, Pakistani madrasa students and other militants, and the forces of al-Qaida, founded in Pakistan in 1988, which fought for the Taliban as Brigade 055. The Taliban’s ability to control significant territory and population, unlike Hizb-i Islami, enabled them to diversify sources of funding. They taxed both the opium industry and the transit trade between the Persian Gulf and Pakistan.¹

China did not back any parties to the conflict during this period, but it was involved in a multilateral effort to end it, the Six (Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and China) plus Two (U.S. and Russia). The Six plus Two was convened by the UN at the senior official or deputy ministerial level.

For some time after the Soviet withdrawal, which ended in February 1989, the U.S. and USSR held a dialogue that was intended to complete the 1988 Geneva agreement with a political settlement, but that ended when the USSR and the Afghan government collapsed in close succession in 1991-1992. There was then no internationally supported peace effort for Afghanistan until 1993, when the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling on the UN Secretary-General to use his good offices to promote “inter-Afghan dialogue” among the parties to the conflict. After four years of effort by three lackluster (including one rather eccentric) special envoys, Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Lakhdar Brahimi as his special envoy. Brahimi, a former minister of foreign affairs of Algeria, had helped to negotiate an end to the civil war in Lebanon as special envoy of the Arab League.

Perhaps because of his experience in Lebanon, Brahimi quickly understood that no amount of inter-Afghan dialogue would help if the parties’ foreign supporters continued to instigate the war. At that time, the only multilateral forum about Afghanistan was the “Friends of Afghanistan,” an informal group largely concerned with humanitarian issues. Brahimi realized that the main countries supporting parties to the conflict would not agree to officially negotiate their differences on Afghanistan, as this would require admission of what they were doing. Over a breakfast meeting in New York during the 1997 UN General Assembly meeting, Brahimi persuaded the foreign ministers of Pakistan and Iran to agree to a formula ostensibly based on geography rather than politics, the Six (immediate neighbors of Afghanistan) plus Two (U.S. and Russia). China attended all meetings and signed all statements, but its involvement was passive.

That group usually met at the United Nations in New York. The greatest achievement of the Six plus Two process led directly to its demise. Brahimi managed to convene all members of the Six plus Two at the deputy foreign minister-level in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, on July 19, 1999. Delegations from the Taliban and the United Front/Northern Alliance were also invited to attend. The meeting issued the Tashkent Declaration on Fundamental Principles for a Peaceful Settlement of the Conflict in Afghanistan,² including:

3. In order to help bring about a cessation of hostilities, which we consider essential, we have further agreed not to provide military support to any Afghan party and to prevent the use of our territories for such purposes. We call upon the international community to take identical measures to prevent delivery of weapons to Afghanistan.

On July 28, less than ten days after the issuance of the declaration, the Taliban launched a major offensive across northern Afghanistan with the participation of thousands of Arab and Pakistani fighters and backed logistically by Pakistan. Such an attempt at a military solution within days of the declaration led Brahimi to submit his resignation (technically, he suspended his mission), on the grounds that the parties were not seriously interested in ending the conflict. No one at the time suggested that China might play a role in persuading Pakistan to restrain its clients.

China’s Role in Historical Context 3: After 9/11

Then came 9/11, a rare moment in history, in which a great power was attacked and seriously damaged by a nonstate actor, al-Qaida. Al-Qaida was founded in Pakistan, but it was not Pakistan’s proxy. By September 11, 2001, its leadership was living under the protection of the Taliban in Afghanistan, but it was not the Taliban’s proxy. The Taliban did not know of bin Laden’s plans, which contradicted promises he had given directly to Taliban leader Mullah Omar. After 9/11, the U.S. had to exert pressure to force General Pervez Musharraf to ambiguously renounce Pakistani support for the Taliban and grant basing and transit rights that enabled the U.S. and its allies to have access to landlocked Afghanistan. Neither the U.S. nor Pakistan consulted China during that round of diplomacy. Musharraf publicly announced his decision to cooperate with the U.S. on September 19, but he did not discuss the U.S. demands on Pakistan with China until almost a month later, and the content of that discussion apparently did not merit discussion in his memoir:

Between September 18 and October 3, I met with intellectuals, top editors, leading columnists, academics, tribal chiefs, students, and the leaders of labor unions. On October 18, I also met a delegation from China and discussed the decision with them.³

China neither actively supported nor opposed the U.S. intervention. In an effort to gain its more concrete support, in September 2002 the State Department designated the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) as a foreign terrorist organization. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, however, revoked that designation in November 2020, removing one of China’s main reasons for cooperating with the U.S. on Afghanistan.

In September 2001, China sent an ambassador as an observer to the UN Talks on Afghanistan in Bonn, where the new government was formed. Lakhdar Brahimi, who chaired the talks, recalled:

[The ambassador representing China] came to see me once after I had briefed all the diplomats present who were not the big six (US, Russia, Germany, UK, France, and Iran).

I told the diplomats that we were cautiously optimistic that we’d achieve success. But one can never be certain that some grain of sand would not stop the machine.

In the course of the discussion, the Chinese Ambassador asked me: what is the grain of sand you spoke about?

I told him I had no idea, but that the Bonn Conference was not the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the outcome of which was predictable with total certainty.⁴

The U.S. Presence as a Security Threat

Starting in 2001, the U.S. enjoyed broad international support for its presence in Afghanistan, but Russia and China had supported the operation on the condition that it would be temporary: the U.S. would defeat the terrorists, the common enemy of all humanity, and then withdraw its forces from the Asian heartland. The U.S. had had bases along the Pacific littoral since the Spanish-American War, but it had never established bases in mainland Asia before.

In 2003, the combination of the U.S. illegal invasion of Iraq and the decision to make Afghanistan into a NATO operation with bases to match sparked concern about U.S. future intentions. The May 23, 2005, U.S.-Afghan joint declaration of “strategic partnership”⁵ confirmed the belief in Russia, China, and Iran that the U.S. was exploiting their cooperation in the name of counterterrorism to establish a foothold in continental Asia.

The response was not long in coming. The perceived support by the U.S. of the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan and the Western condemnation of Uzbekistan’s suppression of Islamist opposition in Andijan in May 2005 increased suspicion about the ultimate aims of the U.S. The heads of member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) issued a declaration at their July 5, 2005, meeting in Astana.⁶ The declaration expressed support for counterterrorism efforts and noted that a number of SCO member states had made infrastructure available to the “antiterrorist coalition” in Afghanistan. It went on to observe:

Given the completion of the active military phase of the antiterrorist operation in Afghanistan, the member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization deem it necessary for the relevant participating states of the antiterrorist coalition to set a deadline for the temporary use of said infrastructure and presence of their military contingents in the territory of the SCO member states.

Despite this statement’s premature declaration of victory, the Taliban’s resistance escalated from 2006 onward, the U.S. and NATO ignored the concerns expressed in the SCO declaration, and suspicions escalated.

In 2013-14, toward the end of Hamid Karzai’s administration, the U.S. negotiated a Strategic Partnership Agreement with Afghanistan, which was more detailed and supposedly more binding than the 2005 declaration. President Karzai ultimately refused to sign it, saying he did not believe the United States would carry out the commitments it made in the agreement but would use it to pressure Afghanistan to appease Pakistan.⁷ Immediately after President Ghani was inaugurated in September 2014, however, Ghani sent his national security advisor, Haneef Atmar, to sign it, confirming the belief of the neighbors that Ghani, a former U.S. citizen, would not deviate from U.S. plans. Those plans might include efforts to use the U.S. presence in Afghanistan against Afghanistan’s neighbors.

The Growth of China’s Regional Ambitions

China, however, had launched its own regional track. By 2013, China had adopted the “Look West” policy and announced the BRI. The flagship of the BRI was to be the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a plan to invest over $60 billion of Chinese capital in Pakistan’s infrastructure. This was but one manifestation of China’s growing closeness to Pakistan. As Pakistan’s former ambassador to China, Masood Khalid, has written:⁸

The language used in the official communications and documents of the two countries over the years best illustrates the historical evolution of this journey of friendship. In the early 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the relationship was merely described as “friendly relations”; in the 1980s, it was “traditional friendship”; in the 1990s, it evolved into “comprehensive friendship”; the 2003 Joint Declaration on Direction of Bilateral Cooperation called it an “all weather friendship”; the 2005 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Good Neighbourly Relations termed it as “bilateral strategic partnership of good-neighbourly friendship” and in July 2013, when the CPEC was launched, it was evaluated as the “China-Pakistan all-weather strategic cooperative partnership.” By 2018, it had been elevated to “China-Pakistan all-weather strategic cooperative partnership and building closer Pakistan-China community of shared future in the new era.” This progression shows the consistent upward trajectory the relationship followed in the last 70 years.

Starting in 2013, terrorist attacks by Uyghur militants, which had been occurring less than once a year for some time, began to accelerate: there were four in 2014. ISIS had also emerged in Iraq and Syria, declaring a caliphate in Mosul, Iraq, in July 2014, until the U.S. intervened to suppress it. Uyghur and other Central Asian militants who had fought with ISIS made their way to Afghanistan. The Uyghurs were collocated with other Central Asian militants in both the Tribal Areas of Pakistan and in northern Afghanistan, bordering on Central Asia.

China thus had three main concerns about Afghanistan:

It wanted to harden the border between the two countries (specifically the border between Badakhshan province of Afghanistan and the Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region in China) and increase surveillance to prevent any cross-border activity by Uyghur Islamist separatists, including those returning from Syria and Iraq. China initiated the formation of the Quadripartite Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism to monitor security in the border area. The QCCM included senior military officials of China, Tajikistan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, a rare case of Chinese mil-mil cooperation.
China wanted to expand the BRI into and around Afghanistan. China hoped to integrate Afghanistan into the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, announced in 2013. This was President Xi Jinping’s signature policy, and it required a secure environment. It was also consistent with the Chinese belief that economic development was the best way to remove root causes of conflict.
Chinese companies also had been trying to invest in the extraction of natural resources from Afghanistan. In 2007, a major mining firm had signed a contract to open what has the potential to be the world’s largest copper mine in Mes Aynak, Logar province. Implementation of the project had previously been halted due to security concerns and the presence of valuable archeological remains. Other companies also signed a joint venture agreement with Watan Industries, an Afghan company, to exploit the oil and gas resources of the Amu Darya basin in Jawzjan province.

China’s involvement in Afghan peace negotiations during this period was a function of those three motives for stability in Afghanistan plus the search for a more cooperative relationship with the U.S. At that time, China was following the path of “peaceful rise” and trying to establish a “new kind of great power relationship” with the United States. As part of the effort to minimize competition and enhance cooperation with the U.S., China offered to cooperate on Afghanistan. This proposal originated in 2008 from the Center for the Study of the U.S. in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), rather than in any body specifically concerned with Afghanistan. It was seen as much as a part of the attempt to build a more cooperative relationship with the U.S. as it was a way to manage the conflict in Afghanistan. The U.S. welcomed the effort, hoping that China’s special relationship with Pakistan would enable it to restrain Islamabad’s support for the Taliban. China similarly used convergence on Afghanistan as a way to try to build more cooperative relationships with the UK, Germany, and India.

CASS had noted language in favor of cooperating with China on Afghanistan in the report of an Asia Society task force that I co-chaired with Ambassador Tom Pickering in 2008-2009.⁹ Until his appointment as U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP), Richard Holbrooke had chaired the board of the Asia Society and was the driving force behind the task force. An official of a Chinese think tank said in June 2009 at a meeting in Dubai that China considered this Asia Society report rather than the official “Riedel report” issued in March 2009 as the authoritative statement of Obama administration policy toward Afghanistan. The task force argued, among other things, that “The United States must establish and maintain a consistent, high-level dialogue with China on security and stability concerns in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”¹⁰

The “high-level dialogue” called for in the Asia Society report began at the second U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Beijing in May 2010. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had met Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi in Beijing in February 2009, a get-acquainted visit a month after her swearing in. At the Strategic Dialogue a year later, however, Secretary Clinton, accompanied to Beijing by SRAP Richard Holbrooke and several members of his team, met with State Councilor Dai Bingguo, to whom the foreign minister reported. Afghanistan was on the agenda for the first time in a U.S.-China bilateral meeting.

In November 2011, at Asian regional meetings in Bali, Luo Zhaohui, at that time Director-General for Asian Affairs at the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, proposed to Secretary Clinton that the U.S. and China cooperate on training Afghans in three areas: agriculture, health care, and diplomacy. These training programs started slowly, but they built sufficient confidence that in July 2012, at a meeting with Holbrooke’s successor, Marc Grossman, in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing, Luo asked if the U.S. would have any objection to China’s making contact with the Taliban to discuss a political settlement. China had been in contact with the Taliban before 9/11, but almost exclusively to discuss the security of Chinese projects and personnel in Afghanistan. This query came in the context of the talks Grossman had been conducting with a Taliban delegation in Doha since early 2011. (The first talks had taken place in Munich at the end of November 2010, two weeks before Holbrooke’s death.) Grossman said the U.S. would have no objection.

Simultaneously, as part of the “diplomatic surge” on Afghanistan announced by Secretary of State Clinton in a speech at the Asia Society¹¹ in February 2011, the U.S. began urging more regional economic cooperation to stabilize Afghanistan. In a July 2011 speech in Chennai, India, Secretary Clinton announced the launch of the New Silk Road initiative.¹² Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi¹³ joined her at an event announcing the initiative at the UN General Assembly in September, but a backlash from nationalist netizens, who accused the U.S. of plagiarizing China’s Silk Road, soon led China to retreat from its initial support.

In November 2011, at a conference in Istanbul, Afghanistan and all its neighbors and supporters established the Istanbul Process, also known as the Heart of Asia Process. China and Russia initially opposed it as an attempt to replace the SCO with an organization controlled by the U.S. through its proxies in Kabul. Pakistan initially opposed it, as it included India. All signed on, however, in part because of the skilled diplomacy of Turkey’s special representative for Afghanistan, Burak Akçapar.

At the 2012 SCO summit meeting in Beijing, China sponsored Afghanistan’s becoming an observer in that organization, and at the April 2013 Almaty ministerial meeting of the Istanbul Process, China signaled a rising diplomatic profile on Afghanistan by offering to assume the rotating chairmanship for 2014. At about the same time, China for the first time appointed a special representative for Afghanistan, Sun Yuxi. Sun had been ambassador to Afghanistan during 2002-2005 and served in Islamabad in the 1980s. He often mentioned his role in the intelligence cooperation between the U.S., China, and Pakistan on arming the mujahidin.

This remarkable about-face may have been linked to the run-up to NATO’s Lisbon summit in December 2014, where NATO set a date for the end of combat operations in Afghanistan. China was looking for means to manage the threat of insecurity in Afghanistan after a U.S. and NATO withdrawal. This was the start of several years of intensified Chinese activity on Afghanistan. China chaired a meeting of Istanbul Process senior officials in Delhi in January 2014 and a ministerial conference in Beijing in October 2014. The ministerial was followed by an official visit to Beijing by President Ghani only a month after he took office. This was his first foreign trip and showed the great hope he originally had that China would help Afghanistan manage its relations with Pakistan. At the ministerial, China backed a proposal from the Afghan government to establish a regional forum on the peace process within the framework of the Istanbul Process, but it was blocked by Russia. U.S.-Russia relations had deteriorated since the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea in March-April 2014.

By May 2015, China’s contacts with the Taliban, made through Pakistan’s ISI, had matured sufficiently that the Chinese hosted a meeting in Urumqi, Xinjiang, between members of the Afghan government and senior Taliban officials.¹⁴ This meeting, however, showed the pointlessness of engaging the Taliban through Pakistan, as both China and the Afghan government wanted to do, for different reasons. The Taliban had a policy of not meeting directly with the Afghan government without first settling issues definitively with the United States, and Pakistan aimed to prevent the Taliban from becoming an independent political actor. The Afghan government delegation to Urumqi was led by Masoom Stanekzai, CEO of the government’s High Peace Council. The Taliban too had appointed officials responsible for peace talks, who were based in Doha away from Pakistan’s control. Instead of these officials, Pakistan brought marginalized individuals resident in Pakistan who had held senior positions in the past and were known to be dependent on the ISI, Mullah Jalil, and Mullah Abdul Razak. They did not represent the Taliban movement and had no mandate to negotiate. It is not clear that China understood the game that was being played.

Meanwhile, President Ghani was pursuing a policy based on the belief that the Taliban were a fragmented congeries of “Taliban groups,” as he insisted on calling them, who owed any political stance ascribed to them to the support of Pakistan. Lengthy negotiations among the U.S., Afghanistan, Pakistan, and China resulted in agreement on a format that all sides could accept. In July 2015, Pakistan hosted the first direct talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government’s High Peace Council in Murree, Pakistan, with both the U.S. and China as observers. The effort to persuade the Taliban’s alleged “deputy” leader Akhtar Muhammad Mansur to authorize participation in talks with the Afghan government’s High Peace Council in the absence of Mullah Omar involved cooperation between the U.S. and China to convince Pakistan, and Pakistan’s pressure on the Taliban leader. Mansur authorized participation by Taliban leaders chosen by the ISI, rather than those the leadership had designated for political talks. The Afghan government welcomed this, as it considered the Taliban to be controlled by the ISI. The meeting was held in and chaired by Pakistan, and once again, as in the meeting in Urumqi, the Taliban figures who participated were not those appointed by the leadership to negotiate, but prominent individuals subject to influence by the ISI. There were no negotiations.

At the meeting, the two sides agreed to continue the process, but it soon stalled. Many Taliban had been asking whether Mullah Omar had really authorized such a meeting, which contradicted long-standing policy. These disputes, plus resistance to the process in Kabul, led to the revelation that Taliban leader Mullah Omar had died two years earlier and that Mansur was fraudulently leading the movement in his name as his supposed deputy. The resulting disputes disrupted the talks and intensified rifts among the Taliban.

Nonetheless, at the Islamabad ministerial of the Istanbul/Heart of Asia Process in December 2015, the U.S., Pakistan, China, and Afghanistan decided to redouble their cooperation. The U.S. had originally planned to hold trilateral talks with Afghanistan and Pakistan and with Afghanistan and China. The parties built on these to announce the formation of the Quadrilateral Coordination Group, including all four countries working together for Afghan peace negotiations. As a result of intensive efforts by this group to revive the talks, they were about to reconvene in May 2016, when the U.S. assassinated Mansur by drone while he was driving back to his home outside Quetta after a lengthy visit to Iran. Mansur, who was from Helmand province near the Iranian border, the province where most of the narcotics trafficking transiting Iran originated, had been seeking closer relations with Tehran to assert more autonomy from Islamabad. The killing derailed the talks again. Mansur had been the main member of the Taliban leadership pushing for negotiations.

China concluded that the U.S. was not serious about peace talks and would always prefer military action. This put an end to bilateral cooperation between China and the U.S. on an Afghan peace process. Responsibility for the intelligence about Mansur’s itinerary and location has not been clarified publicly. While the U.S. has claimed credit for it, there are some indications that the ISI was the ultimate source. Pakistan opposed Mansur’s efforts to draw closer to Iran.

In subsequent years, great power competition over Afghanistan resumed in a different form. As the threat of a long-term U.S. presence in Afghanistan loomed ever larger, Iran and Russia reversed their long-standing opposition to negotiating with the Taliban and opened political contact with them. Russia and Pakistan also had a rapprochement, motivated by concern over the U.S. position in Afghanistan. Soon, U.S. military and intelligence sources started reporting that both Russia and Iran were providing arms to the Taliban, as Pakistan had been doing since 1994. A senior Iranian official confirmed that to me in January 2020, but he said the assistance was only for border security and to fight the Islamic State, which by then had established bases in several parts of Afghanistan. Russia denied aiding the Taliban, but Russian military sources in Moscow claimed that Russia was providing some assistance to “warlords” in Northern Afghanistan. In December 2020, soon after the U.S. revoked ETIM’s terrorist designation, Afghan intelligence in Kabul also arrested 10 Chinese intelligence agents, who were allegedly contacting the Haqqani network of the Taliban, doubtless with ISI assistance, to provide security for Chinese economic projects and intelligence on ETIM.

Great power rivalry led to the start of alternative peace initiatives. In December 2016, seeing that efforts by the U.S. to negotiate a settlement were stalled, Russian envoy Zamir Kabulov, who had already opened a political channel to the Taliban, started what he called the Moscow Process. He said that peace would not come from the U.S. but from the region. The core countries in Kabulov’s conception were Russia, China, Iran, and Pakistan, whose special representatives he convened in Moscow in December 2016. If the U.S. joined the process, Kabulov said, it would be more effective, but if not, the region would go ahead on its own. In subsequent meetings in 2017-2018, Russia enlarged the group to include Central Asian states, India, and Afghanistan, though in April 2017 the U.S. embassy in Kabul intervened with the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs to prevent Afghanistan from participating.

The most important aspect of “peace” as envisaged in the Moscow Process would be the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops, whose presence on the Asian mainland Moscow considered as a potential threat to Russia by way of Central Asia. This was consistent with Russia’s repeated support for the neutrality of Afghanistan. The situation was complicated, however, by the need to combat the Islamic State and militant groups from Central Asia and China’s Xinjiang province, who had established bases in Afghanistan. Russia claimed that the U.S. was sheltering these groups in order to destabilize Afghanistan’s neighbors. China’s viewpoint was ambiguous. A Chinese diplomat, asked about Russia and Iran’s charges that the U.S. was supporting ISIS in Afghanistan, answered, “We share their concern, but not their conspiracy theories.” China’s official policy was to oppose the U.S.-NATO presence on the Asian mainland, but in bilateral talks it put more emphasis on the importance of not withdrawing prematurely. This was most dramatically evident when, at the end of one bilateral meeting, a Chinese senior official abruptly recalled he had not delivered his talking points, which he then read. They included opposition to the U.S.-NATO military presence, which he had not expressed previously and which disappeared from the agenda of subsequent meetings. Later, however, as U.S.-China relations deteriorated during the Trump administration, the spokesman of the Chinese Foreign Ministry explicitly accused¹⁵ the U.S. of using its presence in Afghanistan to destabilize Xinjiang.

The Trump administration’s initial policy document on Afghanistan, issued in August 2017, was more reflective of the views of National Security Advisor General H. R. McMaster than of Trump’s. It did not even mention Russia and China. The policy combined more troops for counterinsurgency with diplomatic pressure on Pakistan, including by encouraging more Indian involvement in Afghanistan.

Trump and McMaster pursued this strategy while Kabulov advanced the Moscow Process. By August 2018, however, the U.S. National Intelligence Council reissued and submitted to the president a revised and updated version of its annual National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Afghanistan, which, as always, could have been titled, “Afghanistan: Nothing We Are Doing Is Working.” The military’s response, of course, was that it needed more troops and time, but Trump seized on the NIE (which he doubtless had not read) as evidence that his instinct to get out was correct. On September 5, 2018, he and Secretary of State Pompeo appointed veteran diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad as Special Advisor on Afghanistan with a mandate to negotiate a U.S. withdrawal in return for counterterrorism guarantees, including, if possible, a political settlement with the Taliban.

Khalilzad knew that a political settlement and stability after a U.S. withdrawal could be reached and implemented only with the backing of the other two great powers, China and Russia, who were also neighbors of Afghanistan. Over the previous several years, U.S. opposition to the Moscow Process, public accusations that Russia was arming the Taliban, and the apparent determination of the U.S. to make Afghanistan a permanent military outpost had brought U.S.-Russia relations over Afghanistan to a new low. Khalilzad reversed the boycott of the Moscow Process and authorized the participation of an official of the U.S. embassy in Moscow to take part in the November 2018 session, which included representatives of both the Taliban and the Afghan government. Soon after, Khalilzad visited Moscow, where he met a skeptical Kabulov, who considered Khalilzad an architect of the U.S. long-term presence in Afghanistan. Both Khalilzad and Kabulov said the meeting went as well as could be expected, and they started to develop an unanticipated partnership.

In February 2018, the Russians held another meeting linked to the Moscow Process: a long-anticipated meeting in a Moscow hotel of delegations from the Afghan Taliban and representatives of the Islamic Republic, if not directly of the Ghani government, whom the Taliban refused to meet. Khalilzad meanwhile reopened direct U.S.-Taliban talks in Doha, now announced publicly rather than held in secret. In March, on a tour of the Middle East, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced in Qatar that Khalilzad and Kabulov would be “closely cooperating.”¹⁶ While he did not say so, he suspended the Moscow Process.

The next step was to create a mechanism for great-power support of the Doha negotiations. Khalilzad invited the special representatives of Russia, China, and the European Union to Washington for a meeting on March 22, 2019, but Russia refused to join a meeting with the EU. Russia considered that the EU was irrelevant to Afghan political and security issues, and that including it amounted to giving the U.S. an extra vote. The EU, like India, Kabulov argued, would be involved at a later stage, involving economic reconstruction. Instead, the U.S., Russia, and China formed what they named the “troika” and invited the EU to join them for lunch.

The troika met again in April, in Moscow. Following Kabulov’s proposed architecture, the troika invited Pakistan and Iran to join them at a July 2019 meeting in Beijing. Pakistan accepted, but Iran, still stinging from President Trump’s repudiation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (nuclear accord), declined. The group referred to the troika plus Pakistan as the “extended troika.” The troika or extended troika held four meetings in 2019 and two meetings virtually in 2020. All members of the extended troika attended the signing of the Doha agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban on February 29, 2020.

The extended troika was supposed to work as follows:

The four members would reach consensus on what was needed.
China would use its influence on Pakistan.
Pakistan would use its influence on the Taliban.
Russia would use its influence on Iran, or at least keep it informed.
The U.S. would use its influence on the Afghan government in Kabul.

The architecture was perfect, but the ability and willingness of the members to agree and the influence the members were presumed to have over others may have been an illusion. Pakistan always claimed that it had some influence over the Taliban but did not control them. China professed similar limitations in its relations with Pakistan. The U.S. and Afghan government’s relationship grew ever more contentious, to the point that Ghani’s National Security Advisor, Hamdullah Mohib, used a March 2019 visit to Washington for a failed effort to try to get Khalilzad fired, doubtless on the instructions of President Ghani. Hence the supposed architecture of influence did not correspond to ground realities. Political science identifies this as the principal-agent problem.¹⁷

Chinese Minilateralism on Afghanistan

China spent at least as much time and energy trying to promote regional diplomatic and economic cooperation, especially better relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan, as supporting negotiations with the Taliban. It was the main force behind the SCO’s Contact Group on Afghanistan, which ultimately included China, Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, and India. China often advocated a prominent role for the Contact Group, but in fact it did very little. China also made sporadic efforts to encourage dialogue among Pakistan, India, China, and the U.S. on Afghanistan, to lessen the perception in both India and Pakistan that the other was using Afghanistan against it. For instance, at the meeting with Marc Grossman in July 2012, as the U.S. delegation got up to leave, Director-General Luo asked if the U.S. could organize a meeting where China and India could discuss Afghanistan. He emphasized, however, that it had to look like an American rather than Chinese initiative. The U.S. did so during the 2012 session of the UN General Assembly, but when Pakistan refused to participate, China also withdrew.

The effort to start a dialogue with India on Afghanistan was symptomatic of a mild disagreement within the Chinese foreign policy elite. While some advocated a South Asia strategy solely based on the relationship with Pakistan, others advocated outreach to India as a near-peer Asian economy, without prejudice to China’s relations to Pakistan. After the election of the Bharatiya Janata Party government of Narendra Modi in May 2014, China made further efforts to improve relations with India. Trade and investment between the two countries were booming,¹⁸ far outpacing China’s economic relations with Pakistan. China and the U.S. competed for the spot of India’s largest trading partner. While Afghanistan was never the centerpiece of their bilateral relationship, it was always discussed as a possible area of cooperation.

President Xi visited India only four months after Modi’s election, and Modi returned the visit soon after, in May 2015. The developing relationship culminated in two “informal summits,” in Wuhan, China (May 2018) and Chennai, India (October 2019). As a result of these meetings, the two countries agreed to coordinate border patrols near Doklam, which had been the site of a military standoff in 2017. The Wuhan final statement affirmed that “as two major countries India and China have wider and overlapping regional and global interests.”¹⁹ Talks began over China-India cooperation on transport links from Uzbekistan to Iran via northern Afghanistan. This project could easily have been part of the BRI, but in deference to Indian sensitivities it was discussed as a standalone project connected to the Indian-Iranian-Afghan cooperation on the port of Chahbahar. These talks made no practical progress, however, and border clashes resumed in June 2020, ending talk of cooperation.

The relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan, however, were at the origins of the conflict. Pakistan had built up and supported the Taliban as the latest step in its long-term strategy to pressure Afghanistan into recognizing the Durand Line as an international boundary and relinquishing its claims to the loyalty of Pakistani Pashtuns, at least those living in the Tribal Areas. Failing that, Pakistan wanted to keep the Afghan government weak and distracted so it would be unable to enforce its claims.

Pakistan claimed that Afghanistan together with India, and sometimes the U.S., used Afghan territory to support the Baluch nationalist insurgency and Pashtun nationalists in Pakistan. After the formation of the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan (TTP, Pakistani Taliban) in 2007, Pakistan charged that India had established intelligence bases including in India’s consulates there to back the TTP. For several years, Pakistan spread false reports that India had numerous consulates (19, by one count) in Afghanistan that it used for espionage and destabilization of Pakistan. In fact, India had the same four consulates outside Kabul that it had had since 1949. The conflict between Pakistan and Afghanistan also manifested itself in numerous other ways, such as periodic closure of the borders to trade and travel.

The U.S., U.K., Turkey, and China all tried to address these problems by holding trilateral talks with Afghanistan and Pakistan, to dispel misconceptions, reduce mistrust, and develop opportunities for cooperation, including against terrorism. The four countries held varying and sometimes inconsistent views of Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan. Even as the U.S. government became more convinced that Pakistan was actively supporting the Taliban, there were limits to how much the U.S. could antagonize Pakistan, as it relied on it for air and ground lines of communication into landlocked Afghanistan. The UK relied on intelligence cooperation with Pakistan to cope with its domestic terrorism challenge, often involving UK residents of Pakistani origin. Relations with Pakistan were part of Turkey’s strategy of seeking counterweights to Saudi Arabia and Iran within the Muslim world. For China, Pakistan was even more important. In 2010, before BRI or CPEC, a senior Chinese official in New York explained Pakistan’s importance to China to me by saying that the U.S. had treaty allies like the U.K., Germany, France, and Japan. China had three “friends”: North Korea, Myanmar, and Pakistan. In such company, Pakistan stood out. Chinese officials understood clearly that Pakistan was supporting the Taliban, which they opposed, but their approach was to address the grievances that led Pakistan to do so.

The U.S., UK, and Turkey had already held multiple meetings of their various trilaterals with Afghanistan and Pakistan when, as part of China’s acceleration of diplomacy on Afghanistan, the national security advisers of China, Afghanistan, and Pakistan began discussing a possible trilateral discussion of border cooperation in 2014. The discussions started toward the end of President Karzai’s term, when Dr. Dadfar Rangin Spanta was NSA. They continued under the presidency of Ashraf Ghani, inaugurated in September 2014, who initially appointed Haneef Atmar as his national security advisor. According to participants, most of the discussion consisted of Afghan charges that Pakistan was harboring the Afghan Taliban, Pakistani charges that Afghanistan was harboring the TTP and Baluch separatists, and China asking for cooperation from both countries over Uyghur militants. They never completed a draft agreement, as both China and Pakistan insisted on referring to the “border” between Afghanistan and Pakistan, while Afghanistan refused to sign unless the document used the term “Durand Line.”

China’s mediation on Afghanistan, as well as its tacit mediation of Kabul-Islamabad tensions, were formalized and raised to a higher level with the launch of the China-Afghanistan-Pakistan trilateral talks officially beginning in 2017. The first public trilateral between the three countries had been held in February 2015 and led by Assistant Foreign Minister Liu Jianchao and his counterparts, who urged Afghanistan and Pakistan to enhance “strategic mutual trust.”²⁰ This meeting format was then elevated to the foreign minister level in September 2015, when virtual talks were held between Kabul (represented by Haneef Atmar) and Pakistan (by Sartaj Aziz) and led by Foreign Minister Wang Yi of China. Wang Yi proceeded to conduct shuttle diplomacy between Kabul and Islamabad in June 2017. The shuttle diplomacy included a clear call on the Taliban to join the peace process.

From 2017 to May 2023, China hosted five rounds of foreign minister-level trilateral strategic dialogue with the Kabul government and Pakistan: in December 2017, December 2018, September 2019, June 2021, and May 2023.²¹ The May 2023 meeting was the first foreign minister-level trilateral dialogue to include the Taliban’s acting foreign minister. These meetings focused on security, stability, and development, with a particular focus on deepening relations, expanding CPEC, and countering terrorism. For China, it provided a forum for China to make clear its interests, attempt to increase trust and consensus, and link the issues of regional stability and infrastructure interconnectivity.

The Doha agreement set May 1, 2021, as the deadline for the U.S. troop withdrawal, exactly one hundred days after the inauguration of President Joe Biden. As the new administration was deliberating over whether and how to implement the agreement (the previous administration had typically made no plans whatsoever for any contingency), on February 22, 2021, I was contacted by an aide to a very senior official of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I had known the official, along with the aide, for about 10 years. The aide asked if I could arrange a meeting between the Chinese official and a high-level State Department official “in charge of South Asia issues, including the Afghan peace process.” Despite my efforts to contact everyone I could, the U.S. never responded at the appropriate level, and the meeting did not take place. Instead, the extended troika met at the level of special representative, a lower level than requested by China, on March 18 and April 30 prior to the U.S. withdrawal.

President Biden, who considered a peace agreement as unlikely as a military victory, decided to keep the promise of withdrawal made by Trump, though he unilaterally postponed the deadline from May to September. The Afghan government completed its collapse after the stealthy departure of President Ghani on August 15. The U.S. troop withdrawal ended on August 31 amid scenes of panicked Afghans trying to leave the country. The Taliban walked unopposed into Kabul.

In the aftermath, China, Iran, and Russia all accused the U.S. of a precipitous, irresponsible, and “unilateral” withdrawal. Wang Yi repeatedly used the term “unilateral,” referring to the U.S.’s failure to consult at a high level with China even when asked to do so. While the completion in 2021 of a withdrawal that was first announced in 2012 may not qualify as precipitous, the great powers and other neighbors all felt they had not been genuinely consulted about the withdrawal and the consequences for them. President Biden and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken seem to have spent more time talking to NATO than to any of the countries directly affected by the U.S. decision.

After the withdrawal, China actively organized diplomatic gatherings on Afghanistan that did not include the U.S. A key component of China’s minilateral diplomacy since the U.S. withdrawal and Taliban takeover in August 2021 has been the Chinese-led Foreign Ministers’ Meetings Among the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan, convening China, Pakistan, Iran, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.It was held first on September 8, 2021. On October 27, 2021, the third Neighboring Countries meeting was hosted by China in Tunxi amid a wide range of multilateral mediation on Afghanistan. The Tunxi meetings included the first trilateral between the “interim” Taliban-led government, Pakistan, and China — with acting Foreign Minister Muttaqi representing Afghanistan²² — as well as a sidelines meeting of the extended troika, which included Sheikh Shahabuddin Delawar as representative of the “Afghan interim Government.”²³ This was similar to the format of a November 11, 2021 troika plus meeting in Islamabad that featured sidelines interactions with Taliban senior officials, and would be the final meeting of the extended troika that would include the U.S. Russia’s special envoy for Afghanistan announced in September of 2022 that Iran would take the U.S.’ place, creating yet another diplomatic gathering free of U.S. influence.

The SCO has also been involved in multilateral discussions on Afghanistan. A month after the U.S. withdrawal, the SCO held a joint summit with the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization. As regional countries grappled with the new political and security reality of Afghanistan, Xi Jinping spoke on implementing the SCO-Afghanistan Contact Group and facilitating a smooth transition in Afghanistan. Then, during the “China + Central Asia” foreign ministers’ meeting in June 2022, Wang Yi suggested the continued use of the Foreign Ministers’ Meeting on the Afghan Issue Among the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan, the SCO-Afghanistan Contact Group, and other mechanisms.²⁴ Formal support of these mechanisms was subsequently solidified in China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ publication of the paper “China’s Position on the Afghan Issue.”²⁵ The foreign ministers of the SCO met on July 29, 2022, and discussed Afghanistan. Wang Yi reiterated China’s stance on a stable, broadly inclusive government that would “clear all terrorist forces” and conduct multilateral coordination.²⁶ The foreign ministers met a second time on May 5, 2023, issuing a statement expressing that they should “support Afghanistan in building a broad-based and inclusive political structure, and sternly combat all forms of terrorism” and that all parties “support to Afghanistan in achieving national stability and reconstruction.”²⁷

China’s minilateral and multilateral initiatives on Afghanistan over the past two years are notable in the number of parties involved. By convening large groupings like the SCO and Afghanistan’s neighboring countries, China absolves itself of targeted international criticism of its relations with the Taliban. On the other hand, although a leader, China has limited unilateral influence in such numerous and diverse multilateral organizations. While the 4th Foreign Ministers’ Meeting of Afghanistan’s Neighboring Countries produced the Samarkand declaration including some of China’s positions on Afghanistan,²⁸ the successful execution of regional objectives²⁹ for Afghanistan remains to be seen. The progress made within China-Afghanistan-Pakistan trilateral talks, as well as on a bilateral Beijing-Taliban level, will be most indicative of Beijing’s ability to steer the political, terrorist, and development situation on the ground.

Three years after the fall of the Islamic Republic, contrary to some speculation, China is not moving in to play the role previously assumed by the U.S. or the USSR. China is not satisfied with the efforts of the Taliban to bring the Uyghur militants under control. The Taliban have moved them away from the Xinjiang border to an area bordering on Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, but China would like them to be arrested and turned over to Beijing. China became the first country in the world to both send an ambassador to and receive an ambassador from the Taliban, and with the improvement of the security situation for those not specifically targeted by the Taliban, some Chinese businesses are exploring investment opportunities, but China is still reluctant to commit to new big projects or to formally recognize the Islamic Emirate ahead of other countries. The Taliban continues to attempt to force swifter progress on the Mes Aynak copper mine, which broke ground on an access road in July 2024³⁰ after 16 years of delays.³¹ A statement near the end of 2023 by an official from Pakistan³² demonstrates China’s hesitancy to formally recognize the Taliban alone. According to Chinese diplomats in Central Asia, while China is pursuing a policy of pragmatic engagement with the Taliban and does not believe that sanctions are productive, it will not provide formal recognition until the Taliban expels ETIM and allied groups from Afghanistan and take steps to form a “more inclusive” government. Beyond offering rhetorical support for inclusive governance,³³ however, China has not yet taken any obvious active steps to support the formation of such a government.

Notes

1
Barnett R. Rubin, “The Political Economy of War and Peace in Afghanistan,” World Development 28, issue 10 (October 2000): 1789-1803.
2
Note: United Nations General Assembly Security Council, Letter dated 20 July 1999 from the Permanent Representative of Uzbekistan to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General, Tashkent Declaration on Fundamental Principles for a Peaceful Settlement of the Conflict in Afghanistan, https://peacemaker.un.org/sites/peacemaker.un.org/files/AF_990719_TashkentDeclaration%28en%29.pdf.
3
Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir (New York: Free Press, 2006), 206, Kindle.
4
Personal communication, August 16, 2022.
5
Joint Declaration of the United States-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership, May 23, 2005, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/WCPD-2005-05-30/pdf/WCPD-2005-05-30-Pg863.pdf.
6
“DECLARATION by the Heads of the Member States of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (Astana, July 5, 2005),” July 5, 2005, http://eng.sectsco.org/documents/.
7
Interview by the author with President Karzai’s National Security Advisor, Dadfar Rangin Spanta, August 16, 2022.
8
Masood Khalid, “Pakistan-China Relations in a Changing Geopolitical Environment,” ISAS Working Paper, National University of Singapore, Institute of South Asian Studies, November 30, 2021, https://www.isas.nus.edu.sg/papers/pakistan-china-relations-in-a-changing-geopolitical-environment/.
9
Asia Society Independent Task Force on Afghanistan-Pakistan, Thomas R. Pickering and Barnett Rubin, co-chairs, “Back from the Brink? A Strategy for Stabilizing Afghanistan-Pakistan,” April 2009, https://asiasociety.org/files/pdf/Afghanistan-PakistanTaskForce.pdf.
10
Asia Society Independent Task Force on Afghanistan-Pakistan, “Back from the Brink.”
11
Hillary Rodham Clinton, U.S. Secretary of State, Remarks at the Launch of the Asia Society’s Series of Richard C. Holbrooke Memorial Addresses, February 18, 2011, https://2009-2017.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2011/02/156815.htm.
12
Hillary Rodham Clinton, U.S. Secretary of State, Remarks on India and the United States: A Vision for the 21st Century, July 20, 2011, https://2009-2017.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2011/07/168840.htm.
13
Wikipedia contributors, “Yang Jiechi,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yang_Jiechi&oldid=1119058784, accessed November 6, 2022.
14
Edward Wong and Mujib Mashal, “Taliban and Afghan Peace Officials Have Secret Talks in China,” New York Times, May 25, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/26/world/asia/taliban-and-afghan-peace-officials-have-secret-talks-in-china.html.
15
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying’s Regular Press Conference on March 26, 2021, March 26, 2021, https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/xwfw_665399/s2510_665401/2511_665403/202103/t20210327_9170714.html.
16
Mir Aqa Popalzai, “Qatar, Russia Pledge To Expedite Efforts For Afghan Peace,” Tolo News, March 4, 2019, https://tolonews.com/afghanistan/qatar-russia-pledge-expedite-efforts-afghan-peace.
17
Wikipedia contributors, “Principal–Agent Problem,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem&oldid=1117274101, accessed November 6, 2022.
18
University of Southern California, US-China Institute, “China and India: Partners and Rivals,” April 18, 2022, https://china.usc.edu/china-and-india-partners-and-rivals.
19
Elizabeth Roche, “Modi-Xi Wuhan Summit: India, China Look to Reset Ties with New Understanding,” Mint, April 28, 2018, https://www.livemint.com/Politics/KGN8AGFVBshENYC4IjcayH/ModiXi-Wuhan-summit-India-China-look-to-reset-ties-with-n.html.
20
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, The First Round of China-Afghanistan-Pakistan Tripartite Strategic Dialogue Held, February 10, 2015, http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2015-02/10/content_2816991.htm.
21
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, Joint Press Release of the 1st China-Afghanistan-Pakistan Foreign Ministers’ Dialogue, December 26, 2017, https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/2649_665393/201712/t20171226_679518.html;
State Council, People’s Republic of China, “China, Afghanistan, Pakistan Pledge Efforts to Safeguard Regional Peace, Stability,” updated September 8, 2019, http://english.www.gov.cn/statecouncil/wangyi/201909/08/content_WS5d7462a3c6d0c6695ff800bc.html;
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, Joint Statement of the Fourth China-Afghanistan-Pakistan Trilateral Foreign Ministers’ Dialogue — On Deepening Trilateral Cooperation, June 4, 2021, https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/2649_665393/202106/t20210604_9170564.html. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, Joint Statement of the Fifth China-Afghanistan-Pakistan Foreign Ministers’ Dialogue, May 9, 2023, https://www.mfa.gov.cn/web/ziliao_674904/1179_674909/202305/t20230509_11073518.shtml.
22
Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, “Wang Yi Presided over the Meeting of the Foreign Ministers of China, Afghanistan and Pakistan,” April 1, 2022, http://af.china-embassy.gov.cn/sgxw/202204/t20220401_10663317.htm.
23
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, Joint Statement of the Third Foreign Ministers’ Meeting Among the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan, March 31, 2022, https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/2649_665393/202203/t20220331_10658230.html; Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, China Chairs the Extended Troika Meeting on Afghan Issue, April 1, 2022, https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjbxw/202204/t20220401_10663273.html
24
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, Wang Yi Attends the Third “China+Central Asia” Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, July 29, 2022, https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/zxxx_662805/202206/t20220609_10700621.html.
25
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, China’s Position on the Afghan Issue, April 12, 2023, https://www.mfa.gov.cn/mfa_eng/zxxx_662805/202304/t20230412_11057785.html.
26
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, Wang Yi Expounds on China’s View on the Afghan Issue, July 29, 2022, https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/wshd_665389/202207/t20220730_10730745.html.
27
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, Qin Gang Attends the SCO Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, May 5, 2023, https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/wjb_663304/wjbz_663308/activities_663312/202305/t20230506_11071465.html.
28
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, Samarkand Declaration of the Fourth Meeting of Foreign Ministers of Afghanistan’s Neighboring States, April 14, 2023, http://be.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/zxxx/202304/t20230414_11059110.htm.
29
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, Qin Gang attended the 4th Foreign Ministers’ Meeting of Afghanistan’s Neighboring Countries, April 13, 2024, https://www.mfa.gov.cn/web/wjbz_673089/xghd_673097/202304/t20230413_11058932.shtml.
30
Government of the People’s Republic of China, “赵星大使出席艾娜克铜矿项目进矿道路建设工程开工仪式,” Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, July 25, 2024. http://af.china-embassy.gov.cn/sgxw/202407/t20240725_11459856.htm
31
Laura Zhou, “Afghan copper mine holds promise for Taliban, tempered expectations for China,” South China Morning Post, July 25, 2024, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3271909/afghan-copper-mine-holds-promise-taliban-tempered-expectations-china.
32
Ayaz Gul, “Regional Countries Mulling Simultaneous Taliban Recognition, Pakistani Envoy Says,” VOA News, November 16, 2023, https://www.voanews.com/a/regional-countries-mulling-simultaneous-taliban-recognition-pakistani-envoy-says/7357983.html.
33
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