Opinion | US leaving Afghanistan clears a lucrative but risky path for China and others

Name: Taliban declares victory from Kabul airport after last US troops leave Afghanistan
Uploaded: 2021-09-07T21:50:25.000Z
Duration: 2 min 18 s
Description: Taliban declares victory from Kabul airport after last US troops leave Afghanistan

The ‘new’ Taliban wants to avoid a return to isolationism and international pariahdom, so its dealings will be tempered by pragmatism

Qatar and Turkey have moved quickly to take advantage of the US absence, and China stands to benefit handsomely in economic and geopolitical influence

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Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, political chief of the Taliban, meets Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Tianjin on July 28. Photo: Xinhua

Hagai M. Segal

Published: 5:50am, 8 Sep 2021

Never get involved in a land war in Asia. Anyone who has seen the 1987 action-adventure film The Princess Bride can tell you that. Yet, it is a lesson repeatedly ignored by US policymakers, culminating in the events we have witnessed in Kabul and across Afghanistan. Wide-ranging implications of the Taliban’s victory will be with us for years, and China is vying to be a major beneficiary.

Tony Blair, who took Britain into Afghanistan, has called the US departure from the country a dangerous abandonment that will have “every jihadist group around the word cheering”.

The return of Taliban rule has again raised the spectre of a global jihadist terror threat emanating from Afghanistan. After the September 11 attacks, the United States came to understand that a key intelligence failure in the run-up to the attacks had been missing the role of the Taliban in lending state resources to al-Qaeda, which turned the terror group from a peripheral menace to a global threat.

In Afghanistan, al-Qaeda developed a truly global network. Years of “terror tourism” to the country facilitated gatherings of jihadists from across the globe, from which emerged ideas and tactics such as using passenger aircraft as guided missiles.

Yet, the reality today is more nuanced. There is cautious confidence in the Western intelligence community that the Taliban has no interest in allowing Afghanistan to again be a base for a catastrophic terror attack on the West.

02:18

Taliban declares victory from Kabul airport after last US troops leave Afghanistan

The Taliban leadership knows the only reason any foreign power will invade again is if they find a September 11-type attack was organised from Afghan territory. The consequences of hosting al-Qaeda was 20 years of foreign occupation and the death of tens of thousands of their fighters, and the Taliban does not desire a repeat.

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