Great blog posts on Afghanistan, China, from China Hand

I’m in Egypt, I really am, even though I haven’t blogged about it much yet. Let’s just say logistical challenges and other concerns have reduced my blogging productivity and immediacy somewhat..
Plus, I’m trying to reach the best possible judgment on how to weigh and report on the many, widely varying viewpoints I’ve heard here so far. Not the work of an hour or a day.
Meanwhile, a lot has been going on elsewhere in the world, and I’ve been a little out of touch. (Apart from looking at updates from the Gaza ceasefire talks and the Israeli elections. More on those topics, obviously, later.)
But this evening, I got some good time to catch up on my reading and discovered that China Hand has published some excellent blog posts on China, Afghanistan, and Pakistan over the past couple of weeks:
In this January 30 post, titled, “China to Obama: “Nice T-Bill Auction Ya Got There…Hate to See Anything Happen to It””, he unravels several key aspects of the current US-China economic relationship.
He looks at the controversy over the dollar exchange rate for China’s RMB (yuan) currency and concludes his post thus:

As a matter of personal opinion, I do think that the RMB is undervalued.
I think the Chinese government, as a matter of practicality, has maintained a dollar peg for its currency in order to provide a stable economic environment for its exporters (instead of making them to manage their forex risk through the complicated free-market frou-frou of currency futures markets, derivatives, etc.), and that’s a legitimate national economic goal;
I think the peg was set on the high side, to give Chinese exporters a bit of a leg-up;
I think the Chinese government believes that its forex structure—the dollar peg, enabled by sale of forex to the government bank and severe limits on cross-border flows of capital—has worked pretty well, especially in light of the financial disaster sweeping the open markets of the United States and Europe;
And… I don’t see the Chinese government heeding international political pressure right now to make more than incremental adjustments to the exchange rate and the overall capital account regime.
Having said that, I think that the Chinese government is desperate to revive the world economy and get its export factories humming again, so it will be prepared to do its bit to help matters along—like pissing away its government reserves buying more U.S. Treasury debt and hope that the Obama administration’s stimulus package jumpstarts the world economy.
And I believe that the Obama administration will decide in the end that Chinese cooperation on the stimulus package will be more important than a political struggle over the exchange rate, especially as the recession causes imports from China to sag.
… Despite the theoretical and practical obstacles, however, there will be continued across the board ideological enthusiasm for continuing to bash China.
Right-wing commentators, it seems, don’t like the Chinese rubbing our noses in our recession because they consider the PRC an imperfect and dishonest exploiter of the magnificent capitalistic system the West has bequeathed to the world.
Left-wing commentators, in my view, consider Chinese macroeconomic activity as an extension of the regime’s immoral policies, as the CCP tramples on the environment, Tibetans and Uighurs, Darfurians, and the world’s working poor with equal gusto in its headlong pursuit of profit.
There is a certain amount of hoping and wishing that the Chinese economy would suffer a spectacular collapse as divine punishment for its government’s malfeasance.
These expectations have been complicated and, perhaps, exacerbated by the fact that it was the advanced free market economy of the West that went into the tank first, and not the inferior Oriental model.
… My bet is that the Chinese banking system, thanks to the recession and government intervention, manages to dodge the well-deserved fiscal bullet again.
I think observers who anticipate that the Chinese Communist party is going to spend itself into oblivion as the Soviet Union did (gorging on the fatal apple of shopping malls instead of armaments) will be disappointed.
Systemic financial failure–hyperinflation or the annihilation of people’s savings through the collapse of China’s state run banking system that terminally discredits the CCP regime and destroys the legitimacy of its rule–doesn’t appear likely.
The recession—and millions of impoverished Chinese returning to their villages from shuttered factories along the coast—will certainly exacerbate the simmering resentment against the Party’s serial corruption, oppression, and arrogant incompetence, especially at the local level.
However, the greatest threat to the Chinese Communist government has never been popular unrest provoked by economic suffering.
It has been the threat of fissures within the ruling elite, of the kind that nearly destroyed the CCP during the Cultural Revolution, is typified by the assisted suicide of the CPSU under Gorbachev, and provoked Deng Xiaoping’s ferocious wrath against Zhao Ziyang during the 1989 democracy movement.
Currently, the CCP ruling cadre in Beijing is riding high, coming off a decade of economic growth with a fair amount of money in the bank, reveling in its Olympic triumph, and enjoying the apparent vindication of its managed, nationalist economic model over the open-market nostrums peddled by the West. The United States, instead of representing a triumphant and destabilizing alternative, is mired in political and economic problems of its own.
If and when popular unrest does occur as a result of the recession, the Party will confront it with an effective combination of ingenuity, unity, and brutality—and the sacrifice of as many flagrantly incompetent and corrupt local officials as it takes–unhindered by the example or effective condemnation of the West.
I expect that, instead of threatening the existence of the CCP, the global financial crisis has enhanced the legitimacy and prolonged the life of the current Chinese Communist regime.
That’s not an endorsement or a value judgment, by the way. It’s just how I see it—and how I think the Obama administration might weigh economics in its China equation.

In this February 2 post, titled, “Required Reading on the Pakistani Taliban: Syed Saleem Shahzad”, CH gives us his version of the highlights of a four-part, ground-reported piece on this important issue from Asia Times Online’s Shahzad.
CH writes,

Briefly, the Taliban heirs to the Pashtun Islamicist militants who did the Western dirty work against the Soviets have returned to the traditional safe havens of the Pakistani tribal belt, this time with the strategic guidance and assistance of al Qaeda. They have responded to military attacks on their strongholds in the tribal areas by dispersing and embedding themselves in the settled regions of the North West Frontier Province (one of Pakistan’s four provinces, with responsibility for the largely autonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas or FATA lining its western border) and infiltrating Peshawar.
The Pakistan Taliban has been strikingly successful in creating an identity for itself beyond a militarized jihadist force, establishing itself as the face of a conservative Islamic movement beyond the tribal areas and in the relatively developed non-urban areas of the NWFP, using its military muscle to promote sharia law, enforce puritanical social norms, advance Islamist ideas of equity and social justice, and even flirting with populism in attacks on the secularized Pakistani political and economic elite, their local adherents, the feudal lords or “khans”, and the armed forces that seek to protect them.
Shahzad paints a grim image of Peshawar waiting for the axe–a high profile outrage in the city center–to fall…
At the heart of the problem appears to be a Pakistan Army and Frontier Corps counter-insurgency campaign remarkable for its ineffectiveness, demoralization, and dishonesty.

This February 6 post was titled “America: Riding Through Asia on that Hellbound Train”. By this point, CH himself was coming up to full steam on his topic.
He started the post thus:

As America is preoccupied with the global economic crisis and the Obama transition, the State Department can worry that the world’s headlong transition to a post-Bush order has torn events from America’s control and we are unwilling passengers on a runaway train barreling through the Middle East and South Asia.
The security, diplomatic, and logistic infrastructure that supports the United States’ adventure in Afghanistan appears to be crumbling, with Iran poised to compel a realignment of regional power away from America’s traditional clients and proxies in the Middle East toward Iran as the price for allowing the Obama administration to extract itself from its deepening quagmire with a semblance of honor.
But first—badminton!

This was a reference to the Iranian government’s refusal to grant visas to members of a US women’s badminton team that had hoped to play in Tehran.
CH added:

the travails of the U.S. badminton team may be a harbinger of something bigger than jockeying for leverage between the world’s only superpower and a regional power interested in reaching an accommodation on the most favorable terms possible.
It may be an indication of Iran’s perception that the time may be ripe to for a fundamental realignment: to not only to compel the Washington to abandon its policy of confrontation with the Tehran, but also to gain legitimacy for Iran’s de facto position as a core regional power that is not a proxy or ally of the United States.
The Iranian government is in a very good position to demand concessions from the U.S. in return for granting the Great Satan’s badminton team the privilege of swatting the shuttlecock in Tehran.
It’s not just because of Iraq, where Iranian forbearance probably has a lot to do with the downswing of violence.
It has to do with the snowballing crisis in Afghanistan.
Perhaps one of the greatest foreign policy/military blunders in American history is now playing out in South Asia.
The United States’ strategic tunnel vision focused on Afghanistan, disregarded the need for an integrated approach to Pashtun militancy on both sides of the Durand Line, and ignored the political and military dangers inherent in displacing the Taliban from Kabul.
The U.S. adopted a policy of malign neglect towards Pakistan’s equivocal and incompetent efforts to suppress the flow of Taliban and al Qaeda elements into its western tribal areas until it was too late, and then actively sabotaged Pakistan’s increasingly desperate efforts to decouple from the Afghan battle and reach a separate accommodation with the militants. Instead, we pelted the tribal areas with drone-fired munitions and, using our diplomatic and financial leverage, pushed Pakistan’s army into ambitious counter-insurgency operations that it lacked the will and ability to execute.
As a result, much of Pakistan’s tribal belt and the North West Frontier Province have fallen under Taliban control. What’s more, the focus of the battle between NATO forces and the Taliban have shifted to western Pakistan—very favorable ground for the Taliban.
The Khyber Pass route—the key supply channel for the NATO force in Afghanistan, including 80% of its fuel—has been temporarily cut with the Taliban’s destruction of a key bridge. NATO trucks are torched as they sit in the NWFP’s capital, Peshawar, waiting to move into Afghanistan.
That’s not all.
The U.S. was almost completely blindsides as Kyrgyzstan—wooed by a promise of $330 million in aid, $2 billion in loans, and who knows what else from Moscow—announced that U.S. forces could no longer use the airbase at Manas.
… So, the same week that the Khyber Pass is blocked, the major route for airlifted personnel into Afghanistan (15,000 troops per month, according to AP; considering there are only 53,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, that’s a lot of traffic) and also for 500 tpm of supplies goes pffft.
And the United States, all of a sudden, has to think seriously about expensive and roundabout rail arteries through central Asia—which means talking to our not very good friend, the brutal dictator of Uzbekistan who threw the U.S. out on its ear in 2005—and inviting the United Arab Emirates to host another large U.S. military facility, in this case an air base to support a war against the Arabs’ Sunni Pashtun Taliban brethren.
The U.S. also finds itself with very good and pressing reasons to make nice with Iran—which has a nice new port at Chabahar that links to landlocked Afghanistan’s eastern border crossing of Zaranj—and from there to Afghanistan’s national highway system via a road link that was built by India and ceremonially handed over to the Afghan government on January 22 of this year.
I have a feeling that Russia and Iran were exchanging high fives at what might turn out to be a brilliant coup—using the supply plight of NATO forces in Afghanistan as a hostage to force Washington to engage with Tehran.

Then on February 9 he had this post, titled “The Great Unwinding”, which I think is one of his most thought-provoking (and most succinct) ever.
He wrote:

Iran, Russia, and China are probably overjoyed that President Obama is not going to pull the plug precipitously on Iraq and Afghanistan. Absent a continued American commitment to the doomed but dangerous democracy crusade and regime change in Iran, there’s nothing our competitors and enemies like to see more than American forces, focus, and political capital tied up in open-ended and unprofitable face-saving regime stabilization efforts in the dead ends of Iraq and Afghanistan.
So, when I see Iran and Russia graciously negotiating to assist in transit of NATO military supplies to Afghanistan, I see two things at work: first, thanks to the American supply travails in Pakistan (and the closing of the main U.S. airbase serving Afghanistan, Manas in Kyrgyzstan, apparently at the behest of the Russians), they see an opportunity to engineer engagement with the United States on favorable terms.
Second, they want to keep the supply lifelines open so the United States doesn’t have an excuse to leave.
Even though pulling the plug on Iraq and Afghanistan might, on balance, be better for the United States.
There is a certain logic to America’s predicament that is pleasant to ignore: that a nation that is overextended financially and militarily should not expect that, after the mandatory wrenching readjustment, it can return to the previously overextended state and continue to advance as if nothing had happened.
… [I]t appears that the United States has the ability to destabilize the [Greater Middle eastern and Central Asian] region through the creation of isolated, pro-American bastion states, but lacks the reach to stabilize it—which might be a clue that it might be better for all involved if we either took our knitting elsewhere, or at least took a back seat to regional powers who, unlike us, have a genuine stake in the turning these battered countries into peaceful and functioning states that enjoy good relations with their neighbors and are integrated into the regional economic and security system.

And in this one, that he posted today, the title alone makes a powerful argument: Pakistan Isn’t a Sideshow… It’s the Main Event.
I guess what I like about CH’s blogging is that he’s a well-informed realist who comes to many of the same conclusions about the US-China balance of relations and the extreme folly of Washington’s two most recent military adventures overseas as I do. And then, he provides us with the wealth of detail that he uses– and we need– to back up his hard-hitting arguments.