Afghan crisis draws China and Russia closer on Central Asian stability as both step up army drills
- PLA and Russian troops to take part in anti-terror drills under SCO banner amid rising worries over security fallout in Central Asia after US exits Afghanistan
- Beijing and Moscow driven by shared US rivalry and concerns about spillovers from the Afghan crisis, now compounded by the Isis-K bombings in Kabul
People’s Liberation Army soldiers will join Russian troops for two weeks of anti-terror drills from September 11 for a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) exercise in southwest Russia’s Orenburg region.
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This year’s SCO counterterrorist drills would include reconnaissance and surveillance missions, fire strikes, containment and control, elimination of remnants, drone attacks and other countermeasures, a Chinese defence ministry statement said.
“China, Russia and other Central Asian countries are worried that an unstable Afghanistan would become a sanctuary for all extremist forces because most of them share common political and religious values,” Yin said.
“The SCO is a good platform to bring all the countries together under the leadership of China and Russia, to come up with useful measures to counter terrorist attacks.”
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The crisis in Central Asia might give China, Russia and the US room to negotiate on working together to counter terrorism, Yin said.
The SCO leaders’ annual summit in the Tajik capital Dushanbe next month would be an important occasion for those countries to reach consensus and seek a way out of the Afghan crisis, he added.
However, Beijing-based military expert Zhou Chenming said the chances of Beijing and Washington working together were still very slim, “but the current crisis in Afghanistan does push China and Russia to work more closely”.
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Shi Yinhong, a noted international relations scholar with Renmin University in Beijing, pointed out the hurdles to a tripartite approach.
He said the suicide bombings indicated that Isis-K was playing very “complicated and subtle games” with the Taliban, which might provide a limited and temporary opportunity for the US, China and Russia to work together in terms of anti-terrorist cooperation.
“The opportunity is there, but it’s very hard to convince leaders of the three great powers to sit down and negotiate amid the ongoing trend of drastic confrontations between China and the US, the US and Russia, on all fronts,” Shi said.
“[The prospects] would have been more optimistic if the opportunity had emerged five or 10 years ago.”
01:43
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Meanwhile, China is set to host its first-ever multinational peacekeeping live-fire exercise, starting on September 6. Troops from Pakistan, Mongolia and Thailand will take part in the 10-day “Shared Destiny-2021” drill at the PLA’s combined-arms tactical training base in Queshan county, Henan province.
“Participating troops [will] cover infantry, fast response, security, helicopter, engineering, transport and medical services [units],” a Chinese defence ministry spokesman said.
More than 1,000 troops would take part, the spokesman said.
“The exercises will focus on battlefield reconnaissance, security guarding and patrol, armed escort, civilian protection, response to violent and terrorist attacks, temporary base construction, battlefield first aid, pandemic control and other [scenarios].”
