Beijing (AsiaNews/Agencies) - Afghanistan's new president, Ashraf Ghani, is offering his Chinese counterpart, President Xi Jinping, help against Islamic terrorism in exchange of economic aid. Both issues are critical to Kabul, which is trying to secure stability before the final withdrawal of US troops, now set in two years time.
On his first foreign trip as head of state, Ghani chose Beijing, where he arrived yesterday on a four-day visit.
China and Afghanistan share a 91-kilometer mountainous border between Pakistan and Tajikistan, in particular, the narrow and almost impassable Wakhan Corridor.
China claims that Uygur separatists from its western Xinjiang region are being trained by the Taliban along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
"In the area of security, President Ghani expressed the readiness and staunch support from the Afghan side in China's fight against East Turkistan Islamic Movement terrorist forces," Kong Xuanyou, director general of the Foreign Ministry's Asian Affairs Department, after Ghani and Xi met.
The two sides said in a joint statement that China would give Afghanistan 2 billion yuan (US$ 327 million) by 2017: 500 million yuan in 2014 and 1.5 billion yuan over the next three years.
Beijing will also help train 3,000 Afghan professionals over the next five years. However, it does not seek to replace Western troops in Afghanistan once they have pulled out. Instead, it has promised to play a "huge" commercial role in helping rebuild the country.
China's commitment to Afghan reconstruction since the fall of the hard-line Islamist Taliban regime in 2001 has been about US$ 250 million and its security support has been mostly limited to counter-narcotics training.