Wargames in the Wahkan Corridor

Here is the slightly unbelievable story of a still-low-key geopolitical shit-show unfolding at the northern border of Afghanistan as the Taliban take over. I’ll bet you’ve not heard a peep about it.

It’s a doozy.

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To set the scene: A few years back I visited the weekly Afghan market on an island in the river Panj near Ishkashim, a border town in Tajikistan. The river is a natural border between Tajikistan to the north, and Afghanistan to the south. Afghan traders come from miles around, pass the security on the bridge to the island, and sell their wares to local Tajiks.

Here’s the wait-zone to the island on the Tajik side on a glorious Saturday morning in 2014:

And here you can see the Afghan traders huddled in the distance, waiting to be let on to the island a few at a time:

Everything behind them is Afghanistan. Once they’re through, they run to the market to set up their stall in the best spot left:

There’s a shed by the market where they can store their stuff and bring it out each week, rather than lugging it over from Afghanistan:

It was a fairly surreal experience, this market. I could stare at the faces of the Afghan traders all day, wondering at the lives they lived, their everyday experiences back over the border: some kind of parallel universe. It was fascinating!

I doubt I was the only one dealing with culture shock: The Afghans also got a face-load of Tajik women in tight jeans:

And it always blows my mind how people from this ever-invaded and conquered region sometimes look exactly like Europeans; just check out the kid below!

Well…

This was then.

At the time, and even through the previous Taliban rule in parts of the country, northern Afghanistan was a totally Taliban-free zone. A few dozen tourists a year were even brave enough to cross over from Tajikistan to Afghanistan, on heavily-controlled guided tours.

I did not.

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About a month ago—July 4 to be precise—the Afghan defence forces in the border town on their side (a town also called Iskhashim) fled across the bridge to Tajikistan as the Taliban approached. Here’s what happened next on that bridge:

This is footage from the Taliban’s propaganda arm as Cool and the Gang carry the Taliban flag onto that very same market island in the Panj river. You may have noticed: no tight blue jeans to be seen in this photo: “Worst Olympic Flag-Carrying Snap Ever”.

If this were the end of the story, I’d slightly forgive you for not giving an actual fuck.

But it’s not. Take a deep breath and a small step back and cop a look at the map of the region:

The Taliban are now in that weird little finger of Afghanistan stretching out to the east: the Wakhan Corridor. The Ishkashim market is close to the start of the finger, at the top, on the border with Tajikistan—dead north of Chitral on the map.

This curious Afghan protuberance was ‘created’ from nothing by the British and Russian empires towards the end of the 19th century in order to put a buffer zone between them; all part of the Great Game.

The bottom-right third of the map is Pakistan, but up in the north it’s not Pakistan, but China—top right—who are playing games. Notice how China has a tiny sliver of border that actually touches the Wakhan Corridor! More on the consequences of this in a moment.

But first: You can also spot Kashgar at the far top-right of the map, the historic Uyghur oasis city, now part of China’s repressed Xinjiang region where the Uyghur muslims are seeing their lives, society, culture, and architecture basically razed to the ground as the world stands by doing sweet fuck all.

But I digress.

So, have a guess what China’s been doing in recent years.

Anyone?

It’s been quietly building a road through the incredibly rugged and basically pristine Wahkan Corridor as part of its Belt-and-Road initiative. End goal: obtain minerals from Afghan mines and transport them to China through the Wakhan Corridor in order to build useless shit for the rest of the planet to buy and then throw away a year or two later, all while pumping billions of tonnes of Co2 into the air.

But I digress.

This half-finished Chinese road now gives the Taliban a path right up to the border with China (lol), so China is suddenly having to work out if it wants to be buddies with the Taliban or not.

I’ll bet they’ll work something out.

Despite the Chinese repressing a muslim society just over the border. Literally just over the border.

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The Wakhan Corridor—that strange finger—has a tiny population estimated at around 12,000 people. Much of it is just mega-massive mountain. Here’s a photo over to it from Tajikistan (from 2014):

You have to admit, it’s a kind of epic paradise (in summer at least). Those mountains go up beyond 5000 m!

Back in winter 2010, the New York Times had this headline about the region: ‘In Icy Tip of Afghanistan, War Seems Remote’:

“The rules that apply to the rest of Afghanistan are often irrelevant in the Wakhan Corridor, a frigid, finger-shaped stretch of land squeezed between Tajikistan, Pakistan and China that is cut off from the Afghan heartland by the icy ramparts of the Hindu Kush. Here, the one constant of life for most Afghans — war — is as distant as a tropical wind.”

In the article they talk about the Kyrgyz herders who have lived there for centuries—cut off from Kyrgyzstan—and the Wakhi people that make up the rest of the 12,000 inhabitants: they are Ismailis, a not-too-strict Islam society.

Now we have the New York Times from July 29, 2021:

“In one of the more peculiar disruptions touched off by the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan, about 350 ethnic Kyrgyz nomads tried to flee the country this month into Tajikistan. Traveling with about 4,000 head of livestock, the herders spent nearly two days traversing a roughly 15-mile mountain pass.

“Ultimately, they were forced to return after their appeal for asylum fell through — but not before touching off a diplomatic dispute and illustrating how the turmoil in Afghanistan is unnerving northern neighbors worried about the sudden arrival of refugees and the prospect of cross-border violence.”

It’s messy: Kyrgyzstan (which doesn’t share a border with Afghanistan) told Tajikistan they’d take in the ethnic Kyrgyz, and the Tajiks said, “Nope”, and sent them back over the border with the claim that the Afghan Government would protect them.

If you’ve been following the news, you may have noticed the Afghan Government has bigger things on its plate right now.

The Tajiks sent the Kyrgyz back to Afghanistan as a sign to everyone else in Afghanistan that it’s going to do everything to avoid having to deal with refugees. I presume this breaks various international laws. As for the Afghan government soldiers that escaped across the bridge: They got chucked on a plane and flown to Kabul.

Another twist to the story is that the Wakhi people in Afghanistan are the same ethnic group as those just across the border/river in Tajikistan. These people are also in northern Pakistan, and also over the border in China too (where their life is not much more fun than that of the Uyghur’s at the moment).

Anecdote: I remember in 2014 being totally amazed standing at the Panj river on the Tajik side, hearing people on my side yelling conversations with those on the Afghan side fifty metres away. Same people, same language.

Should be fine.

And even more random: the Wakhi are an Iranian ethnic group and their language is similar to Persian!

Don’t worry, Iran isn’t involved in this story.

But Russia is!

(And Uzbekistan too):

“Uzbekistan, which also shares a border with Afghanistan, is bracing for instability by planning military exercises together with Russia along the frontier.

“The Russian government has been adjusting, too. Its military this month deployed tanks to the Tajik border with Afghanistan and has overflown the region with ground-attack jets, ostensibly on training exercises. Tajikistan is in a military alliance with Russia, the Collective Security Treaty Organization.”

Tanks and military aircraft!

Fascinating how the American presence in Afghanistan meant that Russia didn’t feel like it had to dominate (and spend cash in) the region over the last two decades, and now—suddenly—it believes it has to send a signal—clearly to the Taliban—to keep well the fuck away from the border.

Also interesting: Russia has now craftily slipped its military into active deployment in several ex-Soviet states including Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.

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I’m quite curious (mixed with grim) to see what happens next up on the northern border of Afghanistan. Will the Taliban try to destabilise Tajikistan and Uzbekistan too? And what the heck will China do with turbaned dudes at the border?

We’ll just have to wait and see, I guess.

I’m sure this story ain’t over yet.