Regional extremists energized by Taliban takeover could pose threat to Pakistan and Chinese interests, expert says

WASHINGTON

China and Pakistan expect the Taliban to fulfill their promises to crack down on foreign extremist groups in Afghanistan, but experts say these groups have already been “energized” by the Taliban takeover, posing new challenges to Pakistani and Chinese interests.

At the 20th Shanghai Cooperation Conference summit last week, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan both called on the international community to engage with the Taliban and Taliban to keep their promises of suppress terrorist groups.

The Taliban have said they will not allow any group to use Afghan soil against any country, without giving details. Some experts say the groups’ rapid takeover of Kabul has already emboldened extremist groups in the region, and countries in the region should expect more insecurity, not less.

There is no evidence that the Taliban will crack down on these groups, said Aqil Shah, professor of South Asian studies at the University of Oklahoma and non-resident researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, adding that the problem with the Taliban is that they say one thing and they do the opposite.

Shah said the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan before the capture of Kabul had boosted the morale of terrorist groups, especially those based in Afghanistan.

There are around 8,000-10,000 foreign terrorist fighters in Afghanistan, including people from Central Asia, the North Caucasus region of the Russian Federation, Pakistan, and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, according to a UN report published in June 2021.

A July 2020 UN report said 6,000 to 6,500 of the foreign fighters in Afghanistan are from Pakistan, and the majority of these militants are affiliated with Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a designated terrorist group. by the United States which mainly carried out attacks on Pakistani security forces.

Threat against Pakistan

The TTP, which pledges allegiance to the Taliban in Afghanistan, has stepped up its attacks in Pakistan in recent weeks.

The group killed seven Pakistani soldiers in a shootout in South Waziristan, a district in northwest Pakistan near the Afghan border, on September 15.

The TTP also claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s southwestern province of Balochistan, on September 5, which killed at least three Pakistani soldiers.

Shah added that the TTP is the main threat to Pakistan’s security as it intends to destabilize Pakistan and possibly overthrow the government of Pakistan.

Pakistani officials have said the TTP is planning attacks from Afghanistan, and they expect the Taliban to keep their promises to prevent the group from using Afghan soil to attack Pakistani security forces. But so far, little public information indicates that any form of Taliban crackdown on the group is imminent.

Abdul Basit, a researcher at the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Nanyang Technological Universities in Singapore, predicts that the TTP will continue its attacks.

For TTP it is the same. If you can defeat the United States, you can definitely defeat the Pakistani army, added Basit.

Pakistani authorities have accused TTP activists of carrying out a suicide bombing attack on a bus last month that killed 13 people, including nine Chinese workers on their way to a dam construction project in the north of the country.

Far from promising a crackdown on the TTP, Pakistani officials have made more conciliatory gestures. Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi on September 15 said Islamabad was ready to pardon TTP members who promise not to get involved in terrorist activities the group has rejected. He said he hoped the Taliban would help convince TTP members to submit to the Pakistani constitution and abandon their armed insurgency.

Qureshi said he remained concerned at reports that hundreds of TTP fighters released from Afghan prisons as the Taliban took control of the country.

Basit said the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan would further increase radicalism in the region and, as a result, recruitment for the groups would increase.

He added that the TTP maintains close ties with other extremist groups, including the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM). The TTP provided them with refuge. They lived together. They fought together.

ETIM, the Islamic Movement of East Turkestan, is a Uyghur separatist group that China calls the most dangerous and extremist terrorist group in its region of Xinjiang. However, although ETIM remains a UN designated terrorist group with several hundred fighters believed to be located in Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province, the United States removed the group from its terrorist list in 2020, citing no evidence. credible that it continued to exist.

Threat to China

China now faces multiple threats from the region with the Americas’ complete withdrawal from Afghanistan, Basit said.

The Americans only fought the jihadists in the region. For China, this is a double blow, because not only the jihadists, (but) the ethno-nationalists are also against China. Basit added that these (terrorist) groups need a great enemy to justify their violence. For the past 20 years, the enemy has been American forces. Now the next big bad is China.

The Baloch National Freedom Movement, a terrorist organization seeking independence for the province of Balochistan in southwest Pakistan, has made it clear that China is their target. In August 2020, the Baloch National Freedom Movement announced an alliance with the Liberation Army of Sindhu Desh, a terrorist organization based in Pakistan’s Sindh province. Together, the two accused China of expansionism and occupation of the region’s local resources.

While terrorist attacks inside China remain unlikely due to the heightened security there, Basit said, the Pakistan-China Economic Corridor (CPEC) project in Pakistan is China’s soft underbelly and ( a) a good opportunity for these groups (activists) to target and (pressure) China to change its behavior (towards) the Muslim community in Xinjiang. Otherwise, the attacks would continue.

CPEC is a series of infrastructure projects comprising highways and ports. Prime Minister Khan describes CPEC as the flagship project of the China Belt and Road Initiative, which aims to expand China’s political and economic influence in Europe.

China hopes the Taliban will prevent ETIM militants from infiltrating Xinjiang. This scenario is considered a major threat to China, said Huping Ling, professor of history at Truman State University and visiting scholar at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University.

China and Afghanistan may only share a 75 km border, which is underdeveloped and largely impassable during the winter months, but Ling said the country has invested resources to secure the border.

For China, it is strategically important to secure the border as it is one of the headaches of maintaining stability, Ling added.

She said the Taliban were looking to China to build infrastructure in Afghanistan to extract between $ 1,000 billion and $ 3 trillion in minerals. It will be good for both China and the Taliban government.

The Taliban have repeatedly said they want close relations with China, especially as Afghanistan has been on the brink of economic collapse since the international community froze donor funds and billions of dollars. of assets.

China is our main partner and represents for us a fundamental and extraordinary opportunity because it is ready to invest and to rebuild our country, Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid told Italian newspaper La Repubblica on September 2.

Washington says China’s crackdown on the Uyghurs amounts to genocide against the predominantly Muslim group, but so far these repressive policies appear to have had little impact on the Taliban’s perspective on Beijing.

They (the Taliban) are so eager to benefit from China’s political and economic aid that they forget that China is one of the biggest aggressors of the Islamic population in the world, said Marvin Weinbaum, director of the Afghanistan and Pakistan program at the Washington-based Middle East Institute.

This suggests that when it comes to the practical politics of government, ideology takes the back seat, Weinbaum said.

Human rights organizations accuse Beijing of committing crimes against humanity by arbitrarily detaining over 1 million Uyghurs and other Muslims in internment camps and forcing others into forced labor .