Copy-paste from the Breaking news thread
Do Taliban have tendencies to spark terrorism beyond Afghanistan border or they are content to simply rule within Afghanistan? I have seen some hot takes that Taliban victories will mean conflict with Iran, Russia, China and other central Asia regions.
Seems people conflate alqaeda and Isis with Taliban.
well this is just my personal opinion:
in a way there is a risk that the Taliban, or the IEA as we are now required to call them, have been lying when they said that theyve cut off ties with the international terrorist groups. There is always a risk of that kind of thing; perhaps some faction would continue to support them even if the top leadership will not. But there are a number of reasons why I find that unlikely.
The Taliban leader had earlier wrote a widely-published letter to the "Caliph" of the IS asking for non-interference with Afghanistan's affairs, and the Taliban have been known to clash with IS followers even as recently as last week. These moves don't really make sense if they were actually in cahoots. As for Al Qaeda, it has been a very long time since there were reported links between the two. bin Laden insisted that he did not let the Afghans know anything about 911, and there is at least some reports of the Taliban growing cold towards the AQ since then.
The other thing is the Taliban's visit to Wang Yi. It makes little sense from the Taliban's perspective to attempt to deceive China about their ties with ETIM while asking for investments. If China was an interventionist power that the Taliban feared would intervene, maybe the Taliban might try to lie, but they know that China hasn't intervened anywhere before, and obviously would not intervene to help the US/India-backed regime while returning to the same quagmire as the Soviets and US. After all the Taliban leadership are overwhelmingly ex-Mujahideen in the Soviet war, they surely remember the good old days. So if that's not the reason it makes little sense to make that trip to Tianjin unless they really wanted investments, investments that will disappear if ETIM shows up in Afghanistan
We don't know if the Western "intelligence" and "experts" are credible about Iran cooperating with Taliban, but the Taliban media even openly praised the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and condemned his killing by the US, and condemned IS for killing Shias, which shows that their policy on Shias has shifted somewhat. So I don't really expect conflict with Iran, not soon anyway.
Overall, China seems to be making the right move, which is to engage them, prepare to eventually recognise the IEA, don't antagonize them, but remain on guard for any U turns, as Hua Chunying et al are using right now
