Ah well, it looks like it is China’s turn to pour money and material into Afghanistan in the hopes of profit and control.
I am sure it will go as well as it did for the USA, the USSR, the British Empire, The Russian Empire… and Alexander and the Macedonians.
They don’t want control, only profit.
That’s why lots of third world countries are flocking for their investment loans and also why the USA is always pissed off that they’re taking away income from the world bank and the IMF.
China will probably make bank with no effort
They don’t want control, only profit.
And they will struggle to get that. They will spend billions and years setting up the infrastructure to extract resource wealth of the region, which is considerable, then the problems will start.
China and Afghanistan have been rather close allies excluding during the Sino-Soviet split. China provided tons of humanitarian aid during and following the American invasion of Afghanistan and is no stranger to helping Afghanistan in times of need.
Afghanistan was an ally of Alexander as well, until such time as it was no longer beneficial to the tribes in control.
The world sees Afghanistan as a country in the modern sense, when it is actually a tribal society that is no more politically cohesive than it was in Alexander’s day.
When you are travelling and ask an American where they are from, they will often say their state, rather than the USA. To them this means a lot as they identify with their state more than with their nation but to outsiders it means nothing, we see than all as Americans.
Afghanistan is the same but a 1,000 times more intense. Ask them what they are and they will reply Pashtuns, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Turkmen, Baloch, Sadat, and about half a dozen others.
There’s a reason China’s interfacing through Taleban.
Yes, because they are currently the ones with the support (or at best acquiesce) of the most of the tribes.
But the currently in the previous sentence has a very short half-life.
I am not telling China to stop, far from it. It will be fun to watch their grand plans to fall to shit the same way the USA’s did.
I thought that the billions they have already pissed away on the belt and road project would have been a cautionary lesson. But it seems not.
So long as the West does not intervene, this is the beginning of Afghanistan’s slow transition into a functioning industrial state.
Industrialism is the first step towards Socialism, and is vastly preferable to medievalism. This is good for both the people and government of Afghanistan and it’s good for both the people and government of China. The only people who lose are the West.
