A Taliban spokesman on Monday welcomed the friendship and cooperation of China, which he said was “expected” to “play its role” in strengthening and enriching the Taliban regime.
“We are ready to exchange views with China on how to forge ahead in terms of boosting our mutual relations, establishing peace in the region, and its assistance in the reconstruction of Afghanistan,” Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen told the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
“China, our great neighboring country, can have a constructive and positive role in the reconstruction of Afghanistan and also in the economic development and prosperity of the people of Afghanistan. It is expected [that] China [will] play its role,” he said.
Suhail claimed the Taliban has “given a clear message to all that no one can use the soil of Afghanistan against neighboring and other countries.”
The international community may be dismayed to learn this message is primarily directed at China, which rushed to pledge friendship, economic support, and diplomatic recognition for the brutal Taliban regime in exchange for promises that the Taliban would not allow groups hostile to Chinese interests to flourish under its protection.
The SCMP’s correspondents pretended Beijing is worried about the Islamic State, or “ISIS-K” as its Afghanistan branch has been christened, and sees the Taliban as the only force that could restrain it. In truth, as the article eventually acknowledged, ISIS-K is not gearing up for some massive battle against the Taliban and China’s only real concern is the alleged existence of militant Uyghur Muslims that China collectively denounces as the terrorist East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM).
The United States dropped ETIM from its list of designated terrorist organizations last year on the grounds that no evidence suggested that it exists.
The SCMP tactfully noted that Chinese diplomats are incongruously celebrating the Taliban as reasonable statesmen, regular Central Asian folks who have the same healthy desires as every other polity, while hundreds of thousands of Afghans are pleading for help and desperately trying to escape the Taliban’s murderous wrath.
Chinese state media continued celebrating the collapse of American military power and global influence on Tuesday, including a Xinhua editorial that mocked the United States for spending two trillion dollars fighting the Taliban but supposedly “little on improving the well-being of the Afghan people.”
Boys wearing a bandana and a cap with the Taliban flag are seen in a march in Kandahar on August 31, 2021, as Taliban supporters celebrate after the US has pulled all its troops out of the country to end a brutal 20-year war — one that started and ended with the hardline Islamist in power. (AFP via Getty Images)
In fact, the U.S. spent over $143 billion on Afghanistan reconstruction since 2002, much of it earmarked for developing the Afghan security and police forces. An estimated $19 billion was lost to waste and fraud over the years.
As customary with Chinese state editorials, Xinhua linked President Joe Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal to every single American policy Beijing dislikes, from investigations of the true origin of the Wuhan coronavirus to “Trumpism” and “America First,” which Xinhua bizarrely insisted are still powerful motivating forces in the Biden White House.
The conclusion was a pitch for Chinese authoritarianism as the only rational guiding force for the post-American world:
The systemic flaws entrenched in America’s political structure have nurtured the selfish, myopic and irresponsible political ethos in the White House. Amid inner-party struggle and partisan discords, U.S. politicians only cast their eyes on winning elections. They can hardly sit together calmly, think rationally, narrow differences, or reach constructive consensuses. Thus they can hardly serve the fundamental interests of American public. The so-called liberal democracy of the United States does not exist at all. This is, in fact, an American-style autocracy.
China’s Global Times played the same notes by accusing Biden of killing Afghan civilians in his clumsy attempt to respond to the ISIS-claimed suicide bombing at the Kabul airport, portraying such “accidental killings” as a standard feature of all American interventions, and claiming the U.S. is therefore hypocritical to criticize Beijing for its human rights violations.
Taliban fighters investigate a damaged car after multiple rockets were fired in Kabul on August 30, 2021. (Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images)
The Global Times concluded with the now-standard Chinese Communist Party (CCP) critique of free-market democracy as inherently irrational and deceitful, while also mocking the professionalism of American soldiers and implicitly holding up China’s military as more precise and disciplined:
It must be noted that most of the time, the US military has been fighting “political wars” in Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern countries. What they often care about is not the actual effect of their actions, but how much their moves accord with the sentiments in US public opinion and the US political needs. They cannot win the wars anyway, so they will fight in accordance with what the incumbent US president needs, to jointly deceive Americans.
If every US attack could precisely hit the target, the situation in Afghanistan could have long been different from what people see today. If the US military could retreat while carrying out the last-gasp offensive accurately against the attackers from the air, the Biden administration and the US military which is now guarding Kabul airport would not have been so panicked.
“The above-mentioned two ‘accidental killings’ of civilians can be argued as the epitome of most U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and even in the Greater Middle East,” the Global Times sneered.
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