One was an end to deference about how parts of that architecture worked. The longstanding CPC ideological critique, which objected to the priority accorded to human rights versus economic development, was certainly emboldened. But there were also those who thought the international financial and development institutions were doing an inadequate job and that China could change things. In 2014, this critique started to be expressed more forcefully and plans to address it set in motion: the focus was infrastructure, and Jin was the man taking on the task. The embryonic institution that would become the vehicle for this was the AIIB.

  In late 2014, Jin was in Washington, DC in an attempt to persuade US officials and the wider policy community that the United States should not set itself against the new institution that he would go on to lead. In his rounds at the DC think-tanks, Jin would blitz through presentations of his case. He knew the failings of the World Bank and the ADB from the inside out and could also translate the implications to ground-level examples in Afghanistan and myriad other developing countries. The basic argument was that there was a tremendous infrastructure deficit in the developing world that the banks’ own reports acknowledged—the ADB put the figure for infrastructure needs alone at nearly $1.7 trillion dollars a year[5]—but that their structures and practices did not allow it to be addressed with the urgency required. They were too fixed in their ways to change. The entire development community had turned hostile to big infrastructure projects long ago. So China would develop its own institution—to complement rather than rival the other multilateral development banks—that would be nimbler and more ambitious at tackling the problem.

  Multilateralizing the effort would help China too, and Jin was frank about what this amounted to. If Beijing channeled its financial firepower bilaterally, not only did the Chinese policy banks have little experience doing serious economic development work outside their borders but they would also be subjected to the familiar pressures to favor Chinese companies and make corrupt deals. Much of China’s money would end up wasted. The AIIB would, in essence, help keep China honest. The slogan that Jin later adopted for the bank was that it should be lean, clean and green.

  I caught up with a friend in the State Department after Jin’s visit—knowing that he had been making the same case to US officials—and noted that it was an impressive performance and a compelling case. He laughed—“Yes, that’s exactly what we’re afraid of!” Jin was making considerable headway around the world with his preliminary talks. The Europeans were eager to sign up. Even India saw the benefits. This was the vision of China stepping up that everyone had hoped for. It left the United States in an invidious position. For all that some senior Obama administration economic policy officials believed that it undercut the existing institutions, that allies should be discouraged from joining it and were understandably disturbed at the alacrity with which they did, other officials on the China side of the house saw this as a very dubious fight to take on. It felt and looked like it was primacy rather than principle at stake. It wasn’t a fight that the United States was likely to win anyway. And of all the fronts on which the United States and China were in competition with each other, multilaterally financed development aid didn’t seem like one to elevate.

  Ostensibly, the AIIB episode was characterized by rifts between the United States and its allies, most of whom—with the exception of Japan—ended up joining the bank anyway. But for all the juicily angry quotes in the Financial Times from senior White House officials, the administration’s heart wasn’t in it. When the AIIB eventually launched in 2014, the United States would raise no objections to the elaborate web of partnerships that Jin established with the World Bank, the ADB and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The attitude was the same as I saw from US officials in Pakistan in the years that followed—skepticism, yes, but if China could pull off what they proposed, good luck to them.

  Meanwhile, much of the rest of the world—including the Europeans—pursued a smother-with-love approach, sending politicians and officials to staff Jin’s already highly international team, and crafting the AIIB’s statutes and rules in ways that everyone could find acceptable. The aim was not to dilute but to ensure that it became what Jin claimed he wanted—a Chinese-created bank that was genuinely multilateral rather than a wholly Chinese-run bank with a bit of international window dressing. Beijing got the kudos of building a new institution and a vastly greater say in the decisions than in the existing ones, yet the whole thing was tempered by the goals and preferences of others, all of whom had been consulted meticulously at every stage in the act of creation.

  The AIIB was often conflated with the Belt and Road, but Jin’s vision for his bank was informed by just as much awareness of how China needed to be saved from itself as the failings of the international system. The Belt and Road itself would operate in precisely the opposite fashion. The rigidity, the ideological paranoia and the need to instrumentalize economic power to serve political and security goals that had become the hallmark of Xi Jinping’s approach would prevail instead. The AIIB would only attract a tiny fraction of the resources that Beijing ended up funneling through its own direct Belt and Road lending. It was clear where Xi’s priorities lay. The changes that took place were mostly in speed and scale after Xi’s chastened summit, not in substance. The pandemic would only deepen the debt crises that a raft of countries were experiencing. Contracts published in 2021 revealed they were under stringent restrictions too, both not to reveal the terms and to accord China privileged status that would mean it would be paid back ahead of other creditors.[6] The contracts functioned as a drag on the entirety of the debt renegotiations across the developing world.

  But even before this, the Belt and Road—from its flagship in Pakistan to the tiny Maldives—was tarnished. If the free-market democracies were able to do a better job of offering alternatives, the opportunity for pushback was there, even with trillions of dollars in play on the Chinese side. As the West had already demonstrated in another country in the neighborhood, vast sums of finance were no guarantee of success.

  Kabul, July 2010

  I had been sitting outside the US embassy in Kabul for half an hour and was growing apprehensive. It was the summer of 2010. My meeting with the ambassador had been confirmed and reconfirmed and my vehicle information placed carefully in the system, but it wasn’t showing up. I was half-wondering whether the meeting would happen and half-nervous about the vulnerable location, too green to the ways of the city to be fully at ease. That Karl Eikenberry was willing to see me at all was surprising. The US was at the peak of its powers there and the war was the single biggest national security priority for the Obama administration. The sense that the eyes of the world were on Afghanistan was tangible from the big-name foreign correspondents thronging in the gardens of the Gandamack Lodge.

  But Eikenberry was a Sinologist, more aware than most how large China would loom over the future of the country and willing to spare a little time for a visitor who was trying to puzzle it out. When I finally made it inside, he shared with me his personal efforts to coax the Chinese into doing a little bit more at least to help out with the economic stabilization of the country. The Chinese had acquired the copper mine at Aynak, which—despite the corrupt circumstances around the deal—would have ensured as much as a third of the government’s revenue, but they seemed in no hurry to extract anything from it. The Chinese ambassador, Zheng Qingdian, was friendly, willing to entertain some modest joint projects, but Eikenberry’s suggestions that the two visit those projects—or indeed do anything visibly together in public—were always rebuffed.

  Within the year, that had changed. The Chinese assessment had been that the US wanted to stick it out in Afghanistan and consolidate its position in China’s western periphery as part of a broader containment strategy. When Afghan officials met with their Chinese counterparts, they would be subjected to assiduous queries about the utility of specific military bases that the Chinese would point out on maps. But Obama’s 2011 speech signaling both a surge and a drawdown was interpreted, after some internal debate, to be more about the latter than the former. Beijing was happy to help the Americans leave, as long as they did so in the right manner. Joint-ness was no longer a problem, and soon no longer were meetings with the Taliban. Beijing was not going to do anything with the copper mine, as the violence in the country intensified, but it would pull out the stops to try to get a peace process underway between the Afghan government, the Americans, and their military opponents.

  These talks proceeded in fits and starts. At points, the US was not serious about them, at times the Afghan government was not serious about them, and at points the Taliban would not show up. China hosted meetings in Beijing, meetings in Xinjiang, joint meetings with the Americans and the Pakistanis, meetings with the Taliban alone. The discomfort was still evident to participants in those meetings: “They would watch the Taliban and Afghan government delegations greet each other warmly and look utterly confused. They had no feel for the people or the relationships…In the end they mostly defaulted to backing up the Pakistanis,” as one participant noted. China was a host, or at best a facilitator. This mattered at times, given how hard it was to get the parties to the table. But it was never a real mediator.

  The Chinese official who had been one of the Taliban’s handlers for their first visit to Beijing a couple of decades earlier was still struck by the slightly alien nature of the whole experience: “They brought their own bread, they wouldn’t eat our food, they wouldn’t leave their rooms except for the formal meetings program.” It was never a comfortable relationship. A fundamentalist movement that swept into power with the backing of China’s Pakistani friends had been looking to Beijing for protection from UN sanctions, economic assistance and recognition of their Islamic Emirate as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. In 2021, they wanted exactly the same things. But for all the meetings that had taken place between the two sides over the preceding decades, Chinese officials were no more at ease with the Taliban than they had been at the turn of the millennium. Yet again, they were ready to deal pragmatically with them. Yet again, that would prove even harder than they had hoped.

  In principle, this was now a worldlier and savvier Taliban than the Kandaharis the Chinese had sent their intelligence agents to meet back in 2000. When I asked a member of that preparatory mission what he had made of Mullah Omar, he paused and chose his words carefully: “Very ambitious.” It was the ambition that still troubled them. They were used to handling all manner of regimes and largely untroubled by what they chose to do within their own borders. Parts of the Taliban sought to convince their Chinese interlocutors that they were really a nationally minded political grouping that just wanted the Americans out and the rest of the world to leave them in peace. This was reassuring. One Chinese academic, Wang Yiwei, even wrote an article implausibly claiming that the Taliban were “Afghanistan’s People’s Liberation Army,” for whom “studying Mao Zedong thought takes precedence over reciting the Quran.”[7] But China was well aware of the transnational agenda of much of the movement and the groups that found haven with them, fought with them and pledged allegiance to them. Beijing cared about one of them over all others: the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP).

  “There is no way to separate Al Qaeda and the Taliban from the TIP.” I was in Shanghai talking to a former Chinese security official who was now running a center on Big Data and Terrorism. He had a team working with open-source tools that had traced the name and location of virtually every Uyghur fighter in Syria and Afghanistan, the bank accounts of Turkish and Saudi funders, the arms that had been transferred to them, the passports provided to help them make their way to Istanbul. “The Turkish government is a little bit stupid, you cannot leave so many traces. How do they expect that the Chinese government and any other government cannot identify their involvement if even outside researchers can find this?” He was explaining the changing fortunes of the group that the Chinese government still called the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), the name by which it had been designated as a terrorist entity at the UN:

  They were very weak when they formed ETIM in the 1990s. The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan [IMU] helped them to join Al Qaeda. Now the IMU has been destroyed. The TIP emir is a member of Al Qaeda’s shura. They negotiated with the IMU on behalf of the Taliban and Al Qaeda when the IMU affiliated to Islamic State. They fought with the Taliban against the Afghan government.

  The tangled story of their affiliations was difficult for most non-specialists on militant groups across Central Asia and the Middle East to follow, but it pointed to the fact that the TIP was now a less disposable partner to the Taliban than it had been in the 1990s, and a more capable one too. It was the track record of the TIP in Syria that worried many of the Chinese counter-terrorism experts who were assessing what might happen if more of them came back to the region and were given a free hand again by the Taliban:

  They’re like special forces, the most capable, fearless fighters, indoctrinated intensively, they get their political and religious training from Saudi imams. Their job is fighting—we see them like victims, like cannon fodder, but they’re very skillful: they coordinate well, attack points with suicide vehicles, then flood in their fighters.

  When Lu Shulin, the Chinese ambassador to Pakistan, had gone to meet the Taliban’s elusive leader, Mullah Omar, in the year 2000, he had highlighted China’s concerns about rumors that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was assisting “the Muslims in Xinjiang,” receiving the reassurance from Omar that “Afghanistan never had any interest or wish to interfere in China’s domestic issues and affairs, nor would Afghanistan allow any group to use its territory to conduct any such operations or support one to that end.”[8] The guarantees sounded convincing, but in practice ETIM members were simply sent to operate under slightly more straitened conditions in IMU camps, as the Big Data expert had noted.

  Relations between China and the Taliban back then had hardly blossomed. While Beijing started to provide some limited economic support to the embattled government in Kabul—including Huawei and ZTE going in to set up phone lines—the Taliban’s decision to destroy the Bamiyan Buddhas set relations back to such an extent that visiting Taliban delegations had arrived in China after the incident to find all their meetings canceled. By the time a major economic delegation from China went back to sign up to a more expansive package of activities, it was on the eve of the 9/11 attacks.

  After the US invasion, Chinese officials never dropped their contacts with the Taliban, continuing to meet with them in Pakistan after they had regrouped. As one former Chinese diplomat put it: “We were the only ones aside from the Pakistanis to maintain continuous contacts with the group.” The Pakistanis had told them that the retreat from Afghanistan was not permanent, and that the relationship was worth keeping alive. In the meantime, China still wanted to make sure that they stuck to their pledge. It provided money and arms as the Taliban’s insurgency resumed, though it dialed down the support after complaints from the British and US governments about the volume of weapons they were encountering on the battlefield.

  There was a subtle but important distinction that the Chinese drew, as their interactions with the Taliban continued. The Pakistanis were keenest that Beijing deal with their people, which usually meant the Haqqani network. The Haqqanis comprised much of the Taliban’s military leadership and would go on to dominate the Taliban government when they ultimately took over. While the Chinese would find ways of doing business with the Haqqanis, they had been skeptical of them, not least given their proclivity for hosting TIP members in their camps. Beijing was more positively disposed to some of the original crowd around Mullah Omar, whom it saw as more pragmatic, and who would comprise much of the Taliban’s international representation. This was the group that sought peace talks with the Afghan government. The most prominent of them was Mullah Baradar, Omar’s right-hand man.

  * * *

  —

  Baradar’s early efforts in 2010 to push for talks with the Afghan government, without the blessing of the Pakistanis, saw him detained after a joint ISI–CIA operation. He would spend the next eight years in a Pakistani prison, released only in the later stages of the talks. But for the final stages of the process, someone of his political weight was essential. He had been close to Mullah Omar, setting up a religious school with him, married to his sister, and would go on to occupy a number of political and military roles in the first Islamic Emirate. Having Baradar as head of the negotiating team was a very different proposition from the foreign policy spokesperson types who were staffing the office in Qatar.

  The agreement ultimately reached between the Taliban and the United States was little more than a force protection agreement, the Taliban being more than happy to facilitate the US exit. All the difficult questions over political power balance in the country were left unresolved, in principle for the ongoing intra-Afghan negotiations, in reality to be determined by military force alone as the Taliban’s advances continued. For a long time, Beijing had watched the war in Afghanistan and wanted neither side to win. It was becoming increasingly clear, though, that China needed to prepare to deal with the aftermath of a Taliban victory. On 29 July 2021, it pressed ahead with an eyebrow-raising meeting in the northern port city of Tianjin. For all the meetings with the Taliban that had taken place before this, most of them were behind closed doors, avoiding the images of Chinese ministers or even officials appearing alongside leading Taliban figures. Now Baradar would be received in the style that one might expect from a leader-in-waiting.