Defeat in Afghanistan paves way for China's rise as global hegemon

National Post, 29 August 2021

In need of fiscal stability and investment, the Taliban will certainly turn toward China.

Plenty of comparisons have been drawn between the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and the 1975 humiliation of American forces in Saigon. I am more persuaded by those commentators who see something more like the Suez crisis of 1956, which confirmed the end of Britain as a leading world power. The waning of Britannia across the seas was not cause for great alarm; the waxing world power was the United States with its, on balance, benign influence.

Today the rising power is China. Is the waxing of China and the waning of America in Afghanistan thus an analogue to the waxing of America the waning of Britain in the Middle East sixty-five years ago? While China’s demographic crisis likely means that its pre-eminence will be short-lived, much damage can be done in twenty or thirty years.

How much will China benefit from the Western humiliation in Afghanistan? Given that China’s foreign minister hosted the Taliban leadership in China last month, it is clear that Beijing sees opportunities.

Indeed, the business pages have been filled with stories about Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, estimated to be worth trillions of dollars. Those stories have run periodically over twenty years; more than ten years ago the American defence department called Afghanistan the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” an essential component in battery production.

Consider the Mes Aynak mine, a massive copper play in Afghanistan with an estimated potential to be one of the largest copper mines in the world. A joint venture of the Metallurgical Corporation of China and Jiangxi Copper took out a thirty-year US$1 billion lease in 2008 with the Afghan government. Seven years into the American occupation, the Chinese were already doing the big deals.

Mes Aynak is not in development yet; the Taliban turned against the project as they considered it a project of the American-backed Afghan government. Attacks on the site dissuaded the Chinese from further development. But now that the Mes Aynak mine would profit the Taliban, it is expected that the mega-project will be revived.

One of the indications of world hegemon status is that, in general, the rules of the game are drafted in your favour. The Afghanistan pullout highlights just that.

The fall of the Afghan government means that the new Taliban regime will no longer benefit from American largesse; to the contrary it will face American-led international economic and financial pressure.

In need of fiscal stability and investment, the Taliban will certainly turn toward China, whose investments in the central Asian republics have been a key part of its foreign and trade policy over the last fifteen years.

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