Chinese state media celebrated the third anniversary of Taliban conquest of Afghanistan on Wednesday with friendly state media coverage claiming the country has finally found “relative peace” – but condemning U.S. President Joe Biden for leaving a “mess” in his wake.
The Taliban, a jihadist terrorist organization that governed Afghanistan in the 1990s, returned to power on August 15, 2021, storming Kabul and sending the U.S.-backed government of the country at the time fleeing without a fight. The Taliban had agreed to a deal with Washington, brokered under former President Donald Trump, that would have seen the last American forces leave the country for the first time in 20 years by May 1, 2021, in exchange for the Taliban cutting ties with other terrorist groups and not attacking American troops.
Biden violated that agreement, extending the 20-year war in the country and prompting the Taliban to launch tens of thousands of attacks on the weakened Afghan armed forces, which no longer exist. While Biden had announced plans to abandon Afghanistan by September, he evacuated the military hastily a month earlier as a result of the Taliban’s success. A study published by the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) in February 2023 found that Biden abandoned at least $7.2 billion worth of American military equipment to the Taliban.
The Taliban celebrated the third anniversary of imposing its repressive version of sharia onto the Afghan population on Tuesday with a massive parade at the former Bagram American air base, parading American-made vehicles before an audience that reportedly included Chinese diplomats:
CGTN, a Chinese state television network, covered the parade favorably.
While the Chinese government is currently conducting a genocide against Muslims on its border with Afghanistan – and, as a communist state, is explicitly atheist – Beijing has endeavored to forge friendly ties with the Taliban. The Taliban, in turn, has supported the genocide of Uyghur Muslims in occupied East Turkistan and enthusiastically welcomed Chinese businesses to invest in Afghanistan.
In its retrospective on the anniversary of the Taliban’s return to power, the Chinese state-run newspaper Global Times failed to even mention the Taliban, instead attributing the disastrous state of Afghanistan after three years of jihadists in power to the United States.
“The US has left behind a mess in Afghanistan,” the Times declared. “The UN and other international organizations’ periodical reports paint a gloomy picture of growing humanitarian, security and economic crises.”
“Moreover, Afghanistan is the world’s fastest-growing producer of methamphetamine, the deadliest type of illicit drug,” the report continued, adding that the Taliban has failed to contain terrorist groups “including Al Qaeda, Islamic State, and Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP).”
“In other words, the defeat [of the United States] in Afghanistan is the central piece of the global failure in combating international terrorism,” it concluded.
The tenor of the Global Times‘s coverage different significantly from that of China’s flagship news agency, Xinhua, which celebrated the Taliban for allegedly greatly improving the security situation in Afghanistan.
“Things did not develop in the bad direction, and Afghanistan finally ushered in three years of relative peace,” Xinhua claimed, failing to mention the methamphetamine and terrorism problems the Global Times highlighted. Xinhua quoted an Afghan citizen identified as Mohammadajan who claimed, “The security situation here has improved 100 percent, and the number of beggars and thieves on the street has also gradually decreased.”
The only negative coverage of Taliban-run Afghanistan in Xinhua was attributed to the United States: “severe economic challenges” in the impoverished country that the Chinese outlet blamed entirely on American sanctions on terrorists.
“Following the U.S. military withdrawal, Washington has slapped sanctions on the new Afghan administration, freezing Afghanistan’s central bank assets worth billions of U.S. dollars and thus plunging the country into an economic crisis,” Xinhua asserted.
The “new Afghan administration” is the Taliban, an entity that China itself does not recognize as the formal government of Afghanistan. Without that recognition, the Taliban cannot access Afghan government funds.
China has recognized the Taliban as the “interim government” of Afghanistan but has not fully elevated its status. The Communist Party has made clear that it has no qualms about working with the brutal jihadists on joint economic projects or offering geopolitical support. China became the first country to welcome a Taliban ambassador in December and sent an ambassador to Kabul in September. It has welcomed the Taliban to events tied to its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a global infrastructure plan in which China offers predatory loans to impoverished countries to ensure political control over its leaders. Taliban leaders have expressed a desire to formally join the BRI.
The Taliban has also encouraged Chinese companies to invest in business in Afghanistan. In August 2023, Taliban leaders welcomed officials from Chinese telecommunications corporation Huawei to potentially discuss installing advanced camera systems in the country. Taliban leaders have also sought billions of dollars in mining contracts with foreign companies, many of them Chinese.
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