Making Afghanistan safe for (Chinese) investment

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from the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/30/world/asia/30mine.html?_r=2&ref=world&pagewanted=print



China Willing to Spend Big on Afghan Commerce

While the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda here, China is securing raw material for its voracious economy. The world’s superpower is focused on security. Its fastest rising competitor concentrates on commerce.

S. Frederick Starr, the chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, an independent research organization in Washington, said that skeptics might wonder whether Washington and NATO had conducted “an unacknowledged preparatory phase for the Chinese economic penetration of Afghanistan.”

“We do the heavy lifting,” he said. “And they pick the fruit.”

___ American troops do not, in a narrow sense, protect the Chinese. The United States Army stations about 2,000 troops in Logar Province, where Aynak is located. But an Army spokesman said they generally patrolled well south of the mine area and had not provided direct security for Chinese investors or mine workers.

The Afghan National Police, which does protect the mine, was largely built and trained with American money. The 1,500 guards the police have posted in and around Aynak are special recruits not drawn from the main force, according to Maj. Gen. Sayed Kamal, who heads the National Police.

But the conclusion is inescapable: American troops have helped make Afghanistan safe for Chinese investment. And there is no sense that either government objects to that reality. As diplomats and soldiers alike stress, the war in Afghanistan was never motivated by commercial prospects. Had an American company won Aynak, some Afghans noted wryly, critics inevitably would have accused the United States of waging war to seize the country’s mineral wealth. Moreover, if China succeeds in developing Aynak and generating revenue for the Kabul government, that helps achieve an American goal . . .

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/30/world/asia/30mine.html?_r=2&ref=world



from Stephen M. Walt at Foreign Policy: http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/12/30/making_the_world_safe_for_chinese_investment

While we've been running around playing whack-a-mole with the Taliban and "investing" billions each year in the corrupt Karzai government," China has been investing in things that might actually be of some value, like a big copper mine.

___ The point is not that somehow those wily Chinese have fooled us into squandering a lot of money and lives and annoying lots of people in Central Asia, while they make profitable investments. Rather, the broader lesson is that the entire thrust of U.S. policy towards a large part of the world has been fundamentally misplaced for a long time. If we think we are somehow trapped in an endless cycle of intervention in the Muslim world-Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, now Yemen-it is because our policies towards the entire region have generated enormous animosity and to little good purpose. And when that animosity leads to direct attacks on the United States, we respond in ways that guarantee such attacks will be repeated.

To be sure, some of this situation is due to America's position as the sole superpower, which means that it gets blamed for things that aren't always its fault. Plus, a dominant power does tend to end up with a disproportionate role in providing certain collective goods while others free-ride. (If China ever does supplant the U.S as the dominant world power, the same thing will undoubtedly happen to them.) But it also reflects specific decisions that we've been taking for a long time, in the mistaken belief that they would never blow back and affect us here at home. That's why we ought to thinking very strategically about our overseas involvements, and trying to shift those burdens onto locals whenever we can . . .

Don't forget: we are fighting in Afghanistan because a radical anti-American terrorist movement-Al Qaeda-located there in the 1990s and then attacked us on September 11. Al Qaeda attacked the United States for a number of different reasons, including its support for various Arab monarchies and dictatorships, its military presence in the Persian Gulf, and its "special relationship" with Israel (which is oppressing millions of Palestinians and consolidating control of Jerusalem). Al Qaeda also wanted to strike at the world's strongest power, in the vain hope that a dramatic act like that would win them lots of new supporters. They also hoped that they could goad us into doing a lot of stupid things in response, and that achievement may be their only real success to date. We are also bogged down in Central Asia because our earlier support for anti-Soviet mujaheddin there helped create a bunch of well-armed warlords and religious extremists who proved impossible to control later on.

But the key lesson is that the current situation is not immutable. We don't have to keep implementing the same policies that led us to this situation . . .

read more: http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/12/30/making_the_world_safe_for_chinese_investment

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1. the Chinese have a long and ancient history with Afghanistan

Tibet was an important player in Central Asia as well. This should not be surprising to anyone who studies history.

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2. maybe not surprising

__ but interesting.

Most interesting to me is the desire of some for China to assume a more dominant role in influencing their lover, Pakistan to adopt more responsibility for our 'war on terror' and India's predictable alarm that the U.S. would even consider China as a mediating influence in the region.

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3. we dont have the power to stop it..

China is our banker. China will do what it wants to. China is in an interesting position.... They dont want jihad in their own backyard. They have enough problems with the Muslims in Xinjiang. These are ancient quarrels... Tibetan Buddhism is in the culture and history of Afghanistan just as the American Indian culture is in the culture and history of the US. We may not be American Indian... but there is no denying the power of American Indian culture in this country. It is subterranean but it is there.

The Chinese do love seeing us stretched too thin.