Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani has pledged to help China fight militants, a senior Chinese official said on Tuesday, after Ghani met President Xi Jinping in Beijing on his first visit abroad since his September inauguration.
China, which is connected to Afghanistan by the narrow, almost impassable Wakhan Corridor, says militants seeking to set up a separate state called East Turkistan in its western Xinjiang region are holed up along the ungoverned Afghan-Pakistani border.
Leaders in Beijing, who have been bracing for more responsibility in Afghanistan as the bulk of US-led troops pull out, worry that ethnic Uighur separatists from Xinjiang will take advantage if the country again descends into chaos.
“In the area of security, President Ghani expressed the readiness and staunch support from the Afghan side in China’s fight against East Turkistan Islamic Movement terrorist forces,” Kong Xuanyou, director general of the Foreign Ministry’s Asian Affairs Department, told journalists after Ghani and Xi met.
The two sides said in a joint statement China would give 2 billion yuan ($327 million) to Afghanistan through to 2017, with 500 million yuan of that in 2014 and 1.5 billion yuan over the next three years. China also will help train 3,000 Afghan professionals over the next five years.
China says it does not seek to replace the departed Western troops in Afghanistan but has promised to play a “huge” commercial role in helping rebuild the country.
Up to now, China’s commitment to Afghan reconstruction since the fall of the hardline Taliban regime in 2001 has been about $250 million and its security support has been mostly limited to counter-narcotics training.
Xi has repeatedly urged Central Asian countries to step up the fight against religious militancy, which the Chinese government says helped incite a spate of attacks in Xinjiang and across China in which hundreds of people have been killed in the past two years.
Experts, however, dispute the influence of foreign militant groups in China, and argue that economic marginalisation of Muslim Uighurs, who call Xinjiang home, is one of the main causes of violence there.
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