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Welcome to Gandhara s weekly newsletter. This briefing brings you the best of our reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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China hedges its bets in Afghanistan
Reid Standish and Ajmal Aand report on what China might be planning for Afghanistan, which shares a land border with Beijing and is potentially a major security headache if Muslim Uyghur separatists establish a foothold in the remote region bordering their Xinjiang homeland.
“Afghanistan is probably more trouble than it s worth,” said Raffaello Pantucci, a senior associate fellow at London s Royal United Services Institute, explaining Beijing’s cautious approach to developments in Kabul. “Unless things calm down, Beijing will look to keep the country’s problems at arm’s length.”
30 Apr in 3:00 RUSI
Abdul Hamid Dbeibah and Mikhil Mishustin in Moscow, 2021
On 15 April, Libya’s Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah travelled to Moscow for the first time. During his trip, Dbeibah engaged with senior Russian officials, including Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Secretary of the Security Council Nikolay Patrushev, on intra-Libyan dialogue and energy sector investments.
Royal United Services Institution (
RUSI) reports that after meeting Dbeibah, Shoigu extolled the Libyan people as ‘Russia-friendly’ and called for a resumption of ‘full-scale cooperation’ between Russia and Libya’s defence ministries. Dbeibah vowed to ‘build new bridges’ with Russia and emphasised Moscow’s ability to play a ‘key role’ in Libya’s economy.
The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan highlights the importance of South and Central Asia to China.
May 01, 2021
Pakistan and Chinese soldiers take part in a joint exercise in Jhelum, Pakistan Thursday, Nov 24, 2011.
Credit: AP Photo/B.K.Bangash
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As the United States embarks on its withdrawal from Afghanistan, some wonder what China will do given the country’s critical interests in South and Central Asia. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative is merely the latest articulation of a strategic narrative that imbues the South and Central Asian region with critical importance to China. As Raffaello Pantucci, a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), explains in the following interview, China has long-running interests in the wider region. While Beijing is not poised to follow the Soviet Union and now, the United States, into the “graveyard of empires,” those interests remain important to China.
Poachers are now moving in significant numbers into West Africa, targeting rare forest elephants and pangolins to raise considerable sums.
The Rusi report called for more financial investigations into the wildlife traffickers who were driven from East Africa after a clampdown by authorities.
“Financial intelligence units in the region are failing to carry out financial investigations needed to bring high-level wildlife traffickers to justice,” the London-based think tank said.
Its research found that illegal wildlife trade, worth about $23 billion a year globally, is not a high priority for financial intelligence units in West Africa, and few investigations into such cases are ongoing.