Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August/September 2021, pp. 54-55
Waging Peace
The U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan this summer has raised questions about the future roles of China, Russia and Iran in the region.
The worst-case scenario for all three countries is the departure of U.S. troops being followed by the ascent of the Taliban and other insurgent groups, resulting in an expanded civil war, said Middle East Institute senior fellow Fatemeh Aman on a June 25 webinar hosted by her organization.
“No one wants the Afghan government to fall or the Taliban to come to power violently,” she explained. “This is the only thing that gives me hope. It’s crucial right now for the United States, China, Russia and Iran that their differences don’t play into Afghanistan.”
Iran’s main concern in Afghanistan is security and fears that a civil war could spill over across its border, Aman said. Also troubling is the possibility that Afghanistan could become a haven for international terrorist groups from the Middle East, as well as Central and South Asia.
Being the main route to Europe and beyond for narcotics produced in Afghanistan, Iran—with an estimated four million drug addicts—is also concerned about the narcotics trade. “Addiction has become the number one social issue in Iran,” Aman said. There is also concern about the flow of refugees into Iran should an all-out Afghan civil war break out.
China is growing increasingly concerned about a security vacuum emerging in Afghanistan, said Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty correspondent Reid Standish, and “that situation looks increasingly dire with the Taliban making major advances.”
Until this point, “China has broadly pursued its interests in Afghanistan while relying on the U.S. presence to quell some of the more substantial security threats,” he noted. China has no interest in replacing the United States in Afghanistan in any form, Standish added, but there are deep concerns about the government collapsing.
China has offered limited support to the Afghan, Tajik and Pakistani border services and has a military outpost in Tajikistan along the Afghan border, Standish noted. “But these efforts are single-mindedly focused on Chinese border concerns.” China shares a 47-mile border with Afghanistan.
As to Russia, “while Moscow and Beijing are close in a lot of respects…Russia is still seen as the leader with regard to security in Central Asia…and I don’t think Beijing has the ambition to take that away from Russia,” he stated.
Nikita Mendkovich of the Center for Modern Afghanistan Studies and the Russian International Affairs Council pointed out that despite receiving two decades of training and supplies from the West, Afghan forces are rapidly collapsing in the face of a Taliban insurgency. This, he argued, shows that the U.S. cannot transform the country. “The war is lost,” he said. “Twenty years of NATO troops in Afghanistan show that NATO cannot solve the problem.”
The challenges in Afghanistan and Central Asia will have to be solved “by themselves,” he argued. “NATO and the United States cannot do anything in the future.”
Mendkovich scoffed at a recent White House statement saying that Washington will continue to support Afghanistan’s women, minorities and other vulnerable communities. “I’m afraid that this document is not worth the paper it is printed on,” he said. “The Taliban is winning as we are sitting here. The West doesn’t want the Taliban to win, but no one is going to do anything to make it lose.”
Mustafa Sarwar, senior editor at Radio Azadi, offered a reminder that the citizens of Afghanistan have suffered decades of violence that appears to be without end. “Ordinary Afghans—men and women—on a daily basis are concerned about the situation,” he said. “They have borne the brunt of the long Afghan conflict. They only want one thing: a permanent cease-fire to be able to live in relative peace and security.”
—Elaine Pasquini
