Illustration by M. Morgenstern

ONE day early this summer, when it was still possible to claim progress in Afghanistan, Robert Gates, America's defence secretary, was at an Asian security gathering, reeling off the names of countries who had contributed to it. The list—Canada, Mongolia, Poland—went on and on, while the harrumphing of a Chinese general in the third row grew ever louder. Eventually, he held back no longer. “Why no China?” he demanded. “Where is China on this list?”

Where indeed? The question seemed odd. Unlike the other countries on Mr Gates's list, China has no military presence in Afghanistan. Though China has peacekeepers as far afield as Haiti and Sudan, it is allergic to sending them to neighbouring countries. Perhaps, this columnist later inquired of the general, he meant the modest intelligence that China shares with the United States on jihadists with connections in Xinjiang, China's restive, preponderantly Muslim, western region? No, he replied testily. “I mean the mine. Our copper mine.”

Since then, the mine, at Aynak, a former al-Qaeda stronghold in Logar province just south of Kabul, has shot to prominence. It is the second-biggest untapped source of copper in the world, no less, and China's $3.5 billion investment, signed in late 2007, is easily Afghanistan's biggest. Several miles of sandbags and chain-link fence now surround the mine. Row upon row of neat prefabricated dormitories house several hundred Chinese. When production starts, from 2011, the Chinese owners get half the output and a multi-billion-dollar return on their investment.

And here the controversy begins. For the mine's security, in a land that epitomises insecurity, is paid for by others. Some 1,500 Afghan police guard the site, subsidised by the Japanese. The American army's Tenth Mountain Division patrols the area. As America wobbles over its Afghanistan commitments, Robert Kaplan, an American journalist, puts it thus in the New York Times: “The problem is that while America is sacrificing its blood and treasure, the Chinese will reap the benefits. The whole direction of America's military and diplomatic effort is toward an exit strategy, whereas the Chinese hope to stay and profit.”

Mr Kaplan acknowledges that exploiting mineral reserves creates Afghan jobs and fills the state exchequer. He says China is not ordained to be America's adversary. So America's vision of a moderately stable Afghanistan that no longer harbours extremists is not at odds with China's vision of a secure conduit for natural resources dug out in Afghanistan or brought up from ports on the Indian Ocean. Still, Mr Kaplan's opinion, and a more critical strain, which argues that a murky bid process gave China the Aynak mine and that anyway such Chinese projects do not bring local prosperity, has touched a nerve in China. Even calling China “resource-hungry” is inflammatory, says one commentary. It all adds a “precarious element” to Sino-American relations.

If that is so, China is partly to blame. A growing chorus in its official press calls for America to admit its blunders and pull its troops out of Afghanistan. And though Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, recently assured Pakistan it had American support in the face of Taliban terror, China points out that it will be in Pakistan long after the Americans are gone. China prides itself on being Pakistan's “all-weather” friend, regardless of the prevailing government—civilian and democratic, or military and repressive.

For Indian hawks, China's growing presence in Afghanistan and deep entrenchment in Pakistan, including big infrastructure projects in disputed Kashmir, is all too much. Giving themselves further frights, they point to a letter the China-dominated Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO, which includes Russia and Central Asian members) recently received from the Taliban. It asked for SCO help in driving the American infidels out of Afghanistan. To the hawks, ever sensitive about historical mischief from the north-west, this is another Great Game. So India, too is investing heavily in Afghanistan.

Yet for all China's sneering at America's military efforts in Afghanistan, China offers no alternative. For now, both countries' interests are not far apart. China is as concerned as is the United States—and India, for that matter—about the prospect of a return to pre-war days. The arrival in Palau this week of six Uighurs, originally from Xinjiang, and recently freed from prison in Guantánamo, is a reminder. Under the Taliban, Afghanistan had given them shelter. China still shivers at the idea of disaffected Uighurs fleeing to the wilds of Afghanistan or Pakistan to consort with jihadists. American military power so close to China is not welcome in Beijing; Taliban-backed militant havens even less so.

The Pakistani connection

Admittedly, for all China's self-serving efforts to portray Xinjiang as victim of extremist violence by militants linked to al-Qaeda, evidence for this is slim. Chinese concerns about a jihadist movement spreading across its borders from Afghanistan or Pakistan have until now been overblown. A home-grown reaction to Chinese oppression is reason enough to explain Uighur unrest. Yet even Pakistanis have at times been surprised by the vehemence of China's concerns. When Pakistan's then military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, visited Beijing in 2003 to sign an extradition treaty between the two countries, he was taken aback by the ferocity of Chinese remonstrances about Uighur militants on Pakistani soil.

So China's signals that it wants limits on the spread of American power in Central Asia should be taken with a pinch of salt. The rhetoric is like that over America's presence in East Asia: China grumbles about it publicly, but values America for its restraint on Japan. In Afghanistan China grumbles but lets America guard its economic interests. There's little unusual in that: rising powers have always hitched a ride on the back of declining ones.





Economist.com/blogs/banyan