IT'S A TRAP!:

Weeks before he fled his country, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani gave a warning to world leaders: the advancing insurgents were not "the Taliban of the 20th century coming from the isolated Madrasas"--religious schools--"but the manifestation of the nexus between transnational terrorist networks and transnational criminal organization." 

Those words didn't stop China from welcoming, on the very same day last month, senior Taliban officials in the Chinese port city of Tianjin. Lending the insurgency an air of legitimacy before it seized the country on Sunday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called the Taliban "an important military and political force in Afghanistan" expected to play a key role in the country's peace process.

But Wang was careful to add: "We hope that the Afghan Taliban will put the interests of the country and nation first" and that they will "make a clean break" with terrorist groups, including an Uyghur separatist group that Beijing has blamed for attacks in the northwestern region of Xinjiang. On Monday, hours after the capital Kabul fell, a Chinese official said the country hoped the Taliban would fulfill its promise of building "an open, inclusive Islamic government."

The Chinese official response to the hardline Islamist movement's advance and effective return to power speaks to the awkward new reality China faces as Afghanistan's largest neighbor.

"The Taliban will certainly rewrite geopolitics in South and Central Asia, which of course worries China," Stanley Rosen, a political science professor at the University of Southern California, told VICE World News.

"Even if the Taliban has provided assurance that its territory will not be used to launch attacks [against China], given the group's past history, the Communist Party will still be wary. How unified and monolithic will the Taliban be when they take over?" 

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