President Joe Biden has not only stranded thousands of Americans in Afghanistan, but he has also further endangered Uyghurs living in China’s Xinjiang region.
Communist China has made little secret of its glee at Biden proving that America will abandon allies on a whim. As Kabul fell to the Taliban, Chinese state media publicly celebrated that we would do the same should China invade Taiwan. But the regime of Xi Jinping has even more to gain in the short term by working with the Taliban directly.
The United States and the International Monetary Fund have frozen the assets of Afghanistan’s central bank. Although Afghanistan shares just 47 miles of border with Xinjiang, Beijing could benefit quite a bit by investing in a collaboration. The Taliban need the help to stave off an economic collapse, as they will only be able to access a sliver of the bank’s total $9 billion of assets.
The major investment categories include the following assets (all figures in billions)
(1) Federal Reserve = $7.0
– U.S. bills/bonds: $3.1
– WB RAMP assets: $2.4
– Gold: $1.2
– Cash accounts: $0.3(2) International accounts = 1.3
(3) BIS = $0.7
— Ajmal Ahmady (@aahmady) August 18, 2021
The Taliban would be an ideal Chinese client state via the Belt and Road Initiative. Meanwhile, a more stable Afghanistan also would serve to protect China’s existing infrastructure in neighboring countries such as Pakistan, which also now gains an aggressive new ally in the region against its nemesis: India.
On Thursday, a Taliban spokesman welcomed China’s overtures, expressing an apparent openness to cracking down on Muslim Uyghur nationalists linked to anti-Beijing terrorist attacks in China. The Taliban actually aligned themselves with Uyghur nationalists during their first regime at the turn of the century, but now, they may find a deal with China to be irresistible.
If the Taliban do help China with its persecution of Uyghurs, China could offer them in return the biometric data that the U.S. collected from 80% of the Afghan population. The CCP already uses the same technology to monitor Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and with the collaboration of the Taliban, they can expand their perimeter to include Uyghurs in Afghanistan — which has become a haven for those Uyghurs who have been able to escape from Xinjiang in recent years.
