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PGC – As the United States leave Afghanitan and a trail of broken alliances behind her, the Chinese under Chairman Xi have chosen to side with the Taliban in the war for the hearts and minds of the people.  The same nation-state that is regularly feted in American corporate markets, the same nation-state that has more infliuence over America’s media than the American people do, is busy cozying up with the Taliban in a bid to cull from the Afghan  mountains what gold they imagine they can if the Taliban welcomed their presence.

Perhaps the coal is the geo-political circumstance of Afghanistan itself, a bridge between what is commonly referred to as the Near East and the Far East.  But Afghanistan is a bridge ridged with mountains and difficult terrain, a land not easily tamed if the people of the land don’t will it.  America is not the first Empire to die in those mountains, and she won’t be the last.

So China is figuring on trying a different strategy, make nice with the might that is, a strategy America herself has deployed in the past as well.   It’s a dangerous gambit but fitting with China’s overal strategy of consolidating world power, gain power through influence where the soul eats and sleep, commerce.  If China can help the Taliban exploit the lands for capital for the cause, while getting the kind of cut China will hope to get, this can be a very productive relationship, not just economically, but geopolitically as well.  Still, it’s a dangerous game the Chinese play and it remains to be seen if they have the discipline to be a velvet glove master of a land of iron wills.

A Reluctant Embrace: China’s New Relationship with the Taliban

From warontherocks.com
2021-08-10 03:55:04
Yun Sun
Excerpt:

 

As the United States withdraws from Afghanistan and leaves a security vacuum there, is China moving in by cozying up to the Taliban? On July 28, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi held a high-profile official meeting with a delegation of nine Afghan Taliban representatives, including the group’s co-founder and deputy leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. This was not the first visit by Taliban members to China, but the meeting was unprecedented in its publicity, the…

 

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PGC – The European Union has wanted to destabilize the nationlist spirits of its members for decades now, as a european bureaucratic leviathon would be much easier to manage for the wealthiest families of the continent than what they experience having to deal with multiple sovereignties across multiple borders.

The problem with the experiment is generally the people in these once-sovereign lands who get the short end of that deal eventually turn back to the one potential vehicle of power that can protect them from this European leviathon, your local nationalism.  So Britain Brexits, and in many other European countries there are political factions that are forming around the desire of the losers of the EU bureaucratic leviathon to break free by clinging to local nationalism.  Nationalism of the poles, nationalism of the Germans, Nationalism of the Beligans, etc, etc, etc.

The nationalists in these lands are achieving varying levels of success politically, but enough success that the families that be of Europe, I theorize, are now ready to stop using certain resources to undermine the nationalist trends, importing a shock-and-awe level of other nations radically different than the nations they are coming into (nations as in cultural people groups, not states), under states that are born from that very nation-state but are now seeking to undo their own source of historical power for the last 200 plus years, the nation and the state being one.

Now that the immigrants of Afghanistan have failed to be, in part, the poison pill that would undo these local nationalisms, the powers that are Europe have determined that even if their national lands, since they last occupied them, might be even more dangerous to life than they were before, these failed poison pills must go, lest they continue to foment even more local nationalisms by continuing to stay.

In the course of this story the people we forget are the pawns in the story, the ‘refugees,’ the ‘immigrants’ themselves, shuffled in with real needs but for purposes that never cared much about how their final journeys ever ended, so long as they worked to undo whatever power structures the ones who paid to have them flooded in were paying them to destroy.  Now that the usefulness is now in doubt, expect more European leaders, even previous refugee supporters, to suddenly support sending ‘them all back home.’

Six EU countries want to keep forced return of Afghans despite Taliban offensive

From www.euronews.com
2021-08-10 14:58:03

Excerpt:

At least six EU countries insist that the forced deportation of migrants back to Afghanistan continues despite the Taliban’s alarming gains in recent weeks.

Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, and the Netherlands wrote to the European Commission claiming that halting returns “sends the wrong signal and is likely to motivate even more Afghan citizens to leave their home for the EU.”

Adalbert Jahnz, the Commission’s spokesman for home affairs explained that “it’s up to each member state to make an individual assessment of whether the return is possible in a specific set of circumstances, that needs to take into account the principles, notable the principle of rule of law and other fundamental rights.”

 

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