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The deputy director of the Taliban’s political office in Qatar, Abdul Salam Hanafi, assured Thursday that his group “will never allow anyone to use Afghanistan to threaten China’s interests” during a call with Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wu Jianghao, Chinese media report.
Hanafi assured that the Islamist group is willing to “continue to develop friendly relations with China,” according to a statement from the Asian power’s Foreign Ministry.
Wu told Hanafi that China has always “respected the sovereignty and independence” of Afghanistan, whose people now “have their own destiny in their own hands.”
As well as ensuring the security of Chinese institutions and citizens in the Central Asian country, Hanafi described China as “a friend on whom Afghanistan can rely.”
In late July, prior to the Taliban takeover of Kabul, a delegation of representatives of the group met in China with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who described the Taliban as a “crucial military and political force” in Afghanistan.
More recently, after the American withdrawal from the country, the Chinese Foreign Ministry expressed its hope that the Taliban would form an “Islamic, but open and inclusive” government and “play a constructive role” in the Central Asian country, which would have entered a “new starting point.”
China and Afghanistan share a 60-kilometer border in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang, which is inhabited in part by several ethnic groups of Mohammedan faith.
That is if the Afghans can overcome their pass time of attacking each other. Historically the tribes of Afghanistan have been fighting each other for centuries and that’s what they will revert to in the next few years.They have massive reserves of Lithium and copper which China wants badly but,again,the Afghans historically hate the Chinese.