China makes a deal with the Taliban

Today in Beijing’s neighboring city of Tianjin, China’s Foreign Minister Wáng Yì 王毅 met with a delegation of Taliban officials, including Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, one of the founders and most senior leaders of the Afghan organization.

Context: The U.S. is in the final stages of its military withdrawal from Afghanistan, which Wang said showed “the failure of America’s policies” there.

• China and Afghanistan share a tiny sliver of a border high in the remote Wakhan Valley.
• Wang met his Pakistani counterpart, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, last week, so it’s likely that Pakistan was in the loop on the Taliban visit.
• Also today: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar met in New Delhi and, per the AP, “sought to strengthen a regional front against Beijing’s assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific and their cooperation in Afghanistan.”

Why now? And what do Beijing and the Taliban want from each other? The Associated Press said the meeting was a “highly conspicuous show of friendliness [that] had the appearance of a diplomatic mission at a time when the Taliban are craving legitimacy.”

• Wang promised that China would not interfere in Afghanistan’s internal affairs but also called on the Taliban to “deal resolutely” with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a group China claims is “leading a push for independence in Xinjiang, but which many experts doubt even exists in any operational form,” per the AP.
• ETIM may be read as shorthand for any type of Uyghur activism that could seek a base in Afghanistan.
• Some reports said the Taliban assured Beijing that “the group will not allow Afghanistan to be used as a base for plotting against another country.”

Video: Watch Wang and his Taliban interlocutors posing for photos here.