South East Asia

The crown jewel of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) increasingly looks like a powder keg that has exploded.

Mass protests have for the past month swept Gwadar, a Chinese-dominated Pakistani port city 90 kilometres from the border with Iran that has long been plagued by intermittent protests and Baloch nationalist attacks on Chinese nationals and targets.

Twenty years after being dislodged from power by a U.S. invasion, the Taliban again took charge of Afghanistan in August, prompting the U.S. and its allies to expedite their planned exit from the country. The strict Islamic fundamentalists — whose previous five-year rule was characterized by the oppression of women and minorities, and the harboring of international terrorists — pledged to do things somewhat differently this time. Those vows met with skepticism among the world’s governments and multilateral institutions, which withheld recognition of the Taliban as the legitimate authority in Afghanistan, blocked access to billions of dollars in Afghan assets held overseas and severed the development assistance that had long propped up the economy.

Officials representing several Chinese companies are in Afghanistan to conduct on-site inspections of potential lithium projects, Reuters reported.

Citing China’s Global Times, Reuters reported that representatives of five companies obtained special visas, arriving in Afghanistan in early November, via the China Arab Economic and Trade Promotion Committee in Kabul and Afghanistan’s mining ministry.

Abstract: In its state-building project, the Islamic State had to rely extensively on civilian employees to staff its governing institutions. But despite the importance of these civilian employees to the Islamic State, there has been relatively little scholarship published on their role, and there has been a lack of understanding of the different types of employees. Interviews with 43 former Islamic State civilian employees shed light on the two distinct categories of Islamic State employees: those who became full members of the group (muba`yain) and those who did not (munasirin). There are significant differences in how these two categories were treated by the Islamic State, the positions they were able to fill, the financial benefits they received, and the processes through which they joined and left Islamic State employment. The anecdotal evidence suggests that civilian Islamic State employees in specialist occupations or who were particularly useful to the group had greater latitude to push back against the Islamic State or in other words had a greater degree of moral agency. Understanding the nuances is important in assessing the culpability of the Islamic State’s civilian workers and the danger they may pose in the future.

In fact, if the Heartland were to succeed in joining the Rimland, the maritime superiority of the United States and more generally of the thalassocratic powers would be over. At that point, the U.S. would only have to shift all its military weight to the Indo-Pacific region and unleash a war directly against China, perhaps under the pretext of Taiwan and claims on the South China Sea. Of course, much will depend on the ability of the Eurasian powers to stabilize Afghanistan, to provide for the risks of Daesh terrorism and other Salafist groups closer to Washington’s interests than to Kabul’s.

The international community is coming under increasing pressure to recognise the Taliban and to unfreeze Afghan funds held by the IMF or to risk a humanitarian crisis over the winter and a resurgence of international terrorism.

As Afghanistan heads deeper into winter the desperate need is to avoid a humanitarian crisis. The World Food Programme has launched an appeal to feed up to 23 million people and Médecins sans Frontières have followed suit in the healthcare field. Fortunately, the distribution mechanisms are in place inside Afghanistan; what is needed is for the international community to ensure that UN humanitarian programmes are fully funded. This will require Western capitals to get over the shock of their recent defeat. It goes without saying that hunger and health should not be used as instruments of political leverage.

On November 7, 2021, three persons were killed in two separate explosions in Police District-2 (PD-2) in Jalalabad city, the provincial capital of Nangarhar.

On November 3, 2021, two persons were killed in a roadside bombing targeting a Taliban patrol in the Sah Burhan Agha area of PD-8 of Jalalabad.

The Taliban are carrying out background checks within their ranks as they look to identify and capture infiltrators from rival Islamic State, which has carried out several deadly attacks across Afghanistan since the militant group took power in August.

“Anyone who’s seen as harmful to the government or people of Afghanistan and misusing the authority of the government will be removed from our ranks and eliminated,” Ahmadullah Wasiq, a spokesman of Taliban, said over the phone. “We have also seen reports of unknown armed men entering private homes or punishing people in the name of Taliban.”

Pakistan and local Taliban militants have agreed a one-month ceasefire which may be extended if both sides agree, spokesmen said on Monday, opening the possibility of a fuller peace accord to help end years of bloodshed.

The Pakistani Taliban, or Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), are a separate movement from the Afghan Taliban and have fought for years to overthrow the government in Islamabad and rule the South Asian nation of 220 million with their own brand of Islamic Sharia law.