The Chinese are an amazing people. In their approach to life and politics, there is a "timelessness" that I have not encountered elsewhere.
In mid-2004 I was told that the Chinese were talking to the Afghan Taliban. I found the idea rather incredible.
Between 2004 and 2008, during frequent visits to China, I was unable to get confirmation. Not until 2009 did I get a hint that these talks might be taking place.
Even so, I had no idea of when the process started, but was told not to address the subject publicly. I am now free to do so, since the fact has been acknowledged by the Chinese media.
But why would the Chinese talk to the Afghan Taliban?
At the root of this question is Chinese apprehension about their Uighur citizens, which dates back to the Uighur support for Genghis Khan against the Chinese Jin Dynasty in the early 13th century. This unease was later heightened when the Uighurs, who form the majority in the western province of Xinjiang, converted to Islam.
Chinese concerns grew after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Not only is this province rich in natural resources, most of the countries it borders are even richer.
The Chinese had three things in mind for Xinjiang: economic growth, a demographic shift to reduce the Uighur majority and limited political empowerment of the Uighur. The first two objectives began to be achieved with the completion of the oil pipeline from Kazakhstan and an oil refinery at Urumqi at the turn of this century. The last is still in process.
However, the Chinese were still wary of pro-Islamist movements in the neighbourhood, which could stoke separatism.
China took many initiatives to counter this possibility by reaching out to Central Asia. However, even as its immediate concern focused on pan-Islamic movements in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, its long-term concern was the Islamist forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in that order. Conscious of the fact that the original Taliban were Afghan, it reached out.
Apparently, the Chinese began by expressing their concern to the Afghan Taliban regarding the growth of pan-Islamic forces in Central Asia, which were reputed to have stoked by Russia. But the Taliban were wary.
It took some years to build trust. Years which proved that China had no intention of interfering in Afghanistan militarily, not even in retaliation; years during which Chinese investment in Afghanistan's economic future grew; years in which the Afghan Taliban grew to be wary of Central Asian Islamist forces and to trust the Chinese.
But the Chinese were not investing their time and effort only to secure themselves against Islamist forces in their neighbourhood. For that, as stated earlier, they also had numerous other countermeasures in hand. They had foreseen the possibility of a return of the Afghan Taliban to some sort of political power in the Afghanistan of the future.
With Barack Obama's election as president in 2008, it began to be obvious that the US would pull out or reduce its presence in Afghanistan in the not-too-distant future.
It also became obvious that the Taliban would have a role to play in Afghanistan's political future and that, with each passing day, Hamid Karzai was losing legitimacy. Nor was it likely that any future political dispensation in Afghanistan would accept agreements made by Mr Karzai, at the tail end of his political career, unless the future political players also found these agreements acceptable.
Chinese investment of time and effort in the Afghan Taliban began to look likely to pay off and the "timeless" approach seems to have succeeded again.
The Chinese have already obtained the licence to mine copper in Afghanistan and, this year, the Sino-Afghan project should join the list of the world's largest exporters of copper.
But, if the US Geological Survey report is to be believed, the yet-untapped mineral and oil resources of Afghanistan are worth many billions of dollars.
What is more, it also provides the most logical route for a commercial corridor for Central Asia through Pakistan to the sea. And even as it develops its own commercial corridor through Pakistan, China wants to diversify in the future.
In all these options, China is likely to emerge as the major economic beneficiary.
I have stated the supreme irony of this in earlier articles on these pages, so let me conclude by repeating my words.
The US - the country that has fought for almost 13 years in Afghanistan, which invested time, effort and billions of dollars and which lost thousands of lives - will leave Afghanistan with no gains and plenty of ill will.
China, a country that did not contribute, and will not contribute, towards the security of Afghanistan, a country that invested judiciously in time and effort to win the trust and confidence of (at least) some selected portions of the Afghan peoples, is likely to emerge as the major economic beneficiary.
There really should be a lesson somewhere for the US in this narrative.
The real question is: if the US can discover that lesson, will it learn or will it walk away with its eyes shut as it has done from all previous lessons that history should have taught it?
Brig Shaukat Qadir is a retired Pakistani infantry officer
