China, which has a narrow land border with Afghanistan,
already invests heavily in the war-torn Central Asian state. The state-owned
China Metallurgical Group has a $3.5 billion copper
mining venture in Logar province. Chinese companies ZTE and Huawei are
building digital telephone switches, providing roughly 200,000 subscriber lines in
Afghanistan. Even back in the war's early days in 2002 and 2003, when I worked
in Afghanistan, the Chinese presence was acutely visible in Kabul, with Chinese
laborers on many building sites and Chinese-run restaurants and guesthouses
popping up all over the city. As Robert
Kaplan has pointed out, these investments come with a gratuitous hidden subsidy
from the United States -- which has defrayed the enormous costs of providing
security amid war and looting.