Are the Taliban trying to recruit Russia and China to their side?
Taliban fighters surrender in Herat, Afghanistan on October 14, 2009 (Majid/Getty)
From the Times of India. Intriguing:
The Taliban are no political neophytes. In a shrewd political move, the Taliban sent a letter to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) meeting in Beijing on Wednesday to ask the regional body to intervene and solve the ongoing crisis in Afghanistan.
The letter… is an attempt to exploit the differences between the China-Russia-CIS combine against the United States, highlighting the general perception that the SCO is intended to keep the US out of the Central Asian region.
In the open letter, which was publicised by the Chinese official media on Thursday, the Taliban said, “We call on the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to assist countries in the region against colonialists and adopt a strong stance against the occupation of Afghanistan”.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is a regional body, led by Russia and China but including Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, plus observers Iran, Mongolia, India and Pakistan. In its early days it seemed to have ambitions of becoming a sort of eastern anti-NATO, but its military ambitions have cooled and it has now settled into a sort of irrelevance that took NATO decades to achieve.
But this move by the Taliban is certainly interesting. I’m not sure it’s as savvy as this article makes it out to be, though. As much as China and Russia might want to thwart U.S. influence in their neighborhood, I’m not sure that backing the Taliban is the way they want to do that. Russia, obviously, has a bit of difficult history with Islamists in Afghanistan, and China fears that the Muslim Uighurs are using Afghanistan as a rear base to get Taliban support for attacks on China.
And so both countries are cooperating, in discreet ways, with the U.S. war there. Russia is allowing transport of U.S. military goods through its territory en route to Afghanistan, and China is talking to the U.S. about coordinating its mining activities in eastern Afghanistan with the U.S., possibly with the aim of getting U.S. security for its workers in exchange for help with U.S. development efforts.
So it looks like the Taliban are probably barking up the wrong tree. And doesn’t it seem strange that they are asking for a Russia-led organization to “adopt a strong stance against the occupation of Afghanistan?” Readers with a greater understanding of the Taliban’s foreign policy, please weigh in.
via Taliban’s political ace: A letter to Shanghai group – Pakistan – World – The Times of India.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Joshua Kucera, Tweets Tube. Tweets Tube said: Are the Taliban trying to recruit Russia and China to their side? http://bit.ly/TRcoH [...]
Mr. Kucera,
If I understand the situation correctly, I have to say rather than a shrewd gambit this sounds like a bit desperation on the Tabliban. Perhaps, as the recent fighting in Pakistan might indicate, there has been a real break between Pakistani Army and ISI and the Taliban is looking for a new patron. I am sure that the Taliban are as aware as you and I are that both Russia and China have pretty testy relations with their own Muslim minorities and would have to be pretty hard up on back them. So unless it just a feint, I cannot see it as anything other than a sign that they are choosing the hard place over the rock.
(AAA, although the word “taliban” is grammatically plural, I doubt many of the members of the organization are actually Koranic students so it is not really a group of talib but an organization with the name Taliban. So I would suggest that in English, it is more correct to treat it as a singular noun rather than a plural).