R Krishna Das
The Chinese citizens are against Beijing’s move to recognize the Taliban and respond to its offer of “friendship”.
The development unfolding in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of US troops is keenly watched globally. While the US and UK had hinted it had no reservation recognizing the Taliban that claimed to have occupied 85 per cent of Afghanistan, China had been in a fix to take a call.
Beijing is trying to convince its citizens that a deal with the Taliban is in the interest of China. The people are reportedly against it and there is a reason to justify. Recently, militants ambushed a bus in Pakistan and killed nine Chinese engineers. Besides, the terror strike against Chinese has increased in Afghanistan in the last two years.
“Making an enemy of the Taliban is not in the interest of China,” the editorial in the China’s state-run newspaper Global Times said. As a matter of fact, the US has no longer called the Taliban a terrorist group, and has engaged with it. British Defence Minister Ben Wallace recently said the UK would work with the Taliban should the group come to power in Afghanistan. If China were to turn against the Taliban at this point, it would be tantamount to digging a diplomatic trap by itself, the piece by the Editor-in-Chief said, adding: “I don’t believe that scenario would take place.”
Interestingly, the mouthpiece of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, commented that its people were unaware of diplomacy and played down that it had been under the radar of Islamic militants over the Xinjiang issue. Some Chinese netizens do not understand Afghanistan, the article said. They have put labels on the Taliban and showed abhorrence against it because of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha, and the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which once had activities on Taliban’s domain. This is understandable.
“But as far as I know, the relationship between the Taliban and the ETIM cannot be defined as that the Taliban supports ETIM launching terrorist attacks in Xinjiang. The Taliban tends to go to extremes on religious matters and shares values with many terrorist groups. To what extent their shared values lead to real acts requires an objective assessment,” the author said.
The newspaper hinted that people of China should not be emotional on the issue. The article said the Afghan government and the Taliban had both expressed their friendly attitude toward China. This is certainly good for China. “Yet I saw some people have described the Taliban as an enemy of China’s national interests and called for the antagonism of China against the group. Such a claim is emotional, naive and deeply out of place in my opinion,” the author added.
I wonder if people in China at all have a voice! It is a ‘ communist democracy, – for the communist party, of the communist party, by the communist party.