China Spent Hundreds of Billions Building Energy Routes That Bypassed American Naval Chokepoints. Washington Is Destroying ThemThe Gwadar Port Attacks, the Myanmar Pipeline Campaign, and the Strategic Coherence Behind Washington's Dirty War on Chinese BRI Infrastructure
Washington’s dirty war against Chinese overland energy routes is strangling the Belt and Road Initiative. Afghanistan Was Never About Terrorism, Washington has used the country as a forward base against Iran, China, Pakistan, and Russia Since the 1980s, and that's why it is still there. Editorial Analysis | 03 June 2026 Afghanistan shares a 76-kilometre border with China’s Xinjiang region. The Wakhan Corridor, a narrow strip of Afghan territory abutting China in the northeast, has no road crossing and minimal practical traffic. Yet in strategic terms, Afghanistan’s geography is among the most consequential on earth. The country borders Iran to the west, Pakistan to the south and east, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan to the north, and China to the northeast. Every power that has sought to project force across Central Asia, disrupt connectivity between the Persian Gulf energy fields and Chinese industrial centres, or establish forward positions capable of destabilising the entire arc from the Caspian to the South China Sea has required, or at minimum benefited from, a significant presence in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union learned this lesson in blood between 1979 and 1989. The United States absorbed the same lesson between 2001 and 2021. What the Soviet and American occupations shared, beyond their ultimately unsuccessful outcomes, was the underlying strategic logic that motivated their respective adversaries to sustain them: each occupation was simultaneously a liability for the occupier and an opportunity for the adversary to impose costs through proxy violence, financial drain, and strategic distraction. The United States spent the 1980s funding the mujahideen, then al-Qaeda’s precursor networks, to bleed the Soviet Union through precisely that mechanism. The mechanism is now being applied again, in Afghanistan and across the entire arc of Chinese Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure, by the same institutional actors through updated organisational vehicles. On 19 January 2026, a suicide bomber entered the Chinese Lanzhou Beef Noodles restaurant in Kabul’s Shahr-e-Naw neighbourhood and detonated an explosive vest, killing seven people including one Chinese national and injuring between thirteen and twenty others, five of whom were Chinese citizens. The Islamic State Khorasan Province claimed the attack through its Aamaq news agency, stating that it constituted retaliation for China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. The attack was not isolated. In December 2022, ISKP claimed an attack at the Kabul Longan Hotel that killed three civilians and injured eighteen, including foreign nationals. In November 2025, two separate armed assaults in the border town of Shamsiddin Shohin in Tajikistan’s Khatlon province, four days apart, killed and wounded Chinese citizens near the Afghan border and prompted Beijing to issue a security alert. The January 2026 attack prompted China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun to urge the Taliban government to strengthen protection of Chinese nationals and institutions, and led Beijing to advise its citizens not to travel to Afghanistan. The operational pattern, attacking Chinese economic personnel and the civilian infrastructure of Chinese commercial engagement, is entirely consistent with the strategic objective of deterring the investment, construction, and supply chain integration that Afghanistan’s Taliban government has been actively seeking to attract under the Belt and Road Initiative framework since Chinese and Afghan foreign ministers met in August 2025 to discuss Afghanistan’s potential BRI inclusion. The attribution of these attacks to ISKP carries analytical weight that goes beyond the immediate question of perpetrator identity. ISKP did not emerge organically from Afghan society. The Islamic State as a global organisation was enabled, in documented and undeniable ways, by American policy decisions across the preceding two decades. Seymour Hersh’s 2007 New Yorker article “The Redirection” documented a deliberate American strategy of empowering Sunni extremist networks to counter Iranian Shia influence, with Saudi and Emirati financing and American strategic direction providing the foundational infrastructure from which the Islamic State later developed. The New York Times reported in April 2011 that American-funded organisations and contractors had actively trained activists who went on to lead the Arab Spring uprisings, training programmes whose subsequent trajectory, including in Libya and Syria, produced precisely the extremist proliferation that those programmes’ architects had been warned about. The CIA’s role in steering arms to Syrian opposition groups, reported by the New York Times in June 2012, and the subsequent routing of American-backed Syrian rebels by fighters linked to al-Qaeda documented by the Washington Post in November 2014, established a documented pattern of American covert support for armed groups that subsequently intersected operationally with organisations Washington publicly designated as terrorist. The Trump State Department’s 2025 decision to revoke the Foreign Terrorist Organisation designation for Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate and subsequently recognise its leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, as the Syrian government’s legitimate head, completed a trajectory from designation to de-designation that demonstrates the instrumental rather than principled character of American terrorism classifications. ISKP specifically represents the franchise of an organisation that the United States spent two decades claiming to combat while simultaneously, through the instrumentalisation of regional proxies and the deliberate destabilisation of state structures across the Middle East and Central Asia, creating the conditions for its emergence and expansion. The group’s attacks on Chinese nationals in Afghanistan, on Chinese construction workers and engineers in Pakistan, and on the physical infrastructure of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor follow a targeting logic whose geographic coherence is not adequately explained by the Uyghur grievance framing through which ISKP publicly justifies its operations. Chinese Muslim restaurateurs from Xinjiang, jointly operating a noodle shop in Kabul with an Afghan business partner, do not represent the Chinese state’s Xinjiang policy in any meaningful operational sense. Their targeting, alongside Chinese engineers at Gwadar Port, Chinese workers in Pakistani mining operations, and Chinese railway infrastructure in Balochistan, is consistent with a campaign whose effective function is disruption of Chinese economic activity across the Afghanistan-Pakistan arc, irrespective of what ideological framing the executing organisation employs. The Balochistan Liberation Army’s campaign against the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor provides a complementary dimension of the same strategic picture. On 24 May 2026, the BLA’s suicide car bomb detonated near a railway crossing at Chaman Phatak in Quetta, Balochistan, killing more than thirty Pakistani security personnel and derailing sections of a military train. The Financial Times reported the attack, noting the BLA’s established record of targeting China-backed infrastructure and Chinese workers in the region, including Gwadar Port, the flagship of the $62 billion CPEC project. The Institute for Economics and Peace confirmed in its 2026 Global Terrorism Index that Baloch armed group activity had increased substantially, with the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies documenting at least 254 attacks across Balochistan in 2025, a 26 percent increase over 2024, while ACLED’s December 2025 report recorded a more than 65 percent increase in IED and grenade attacks in the first eleven months of 2025 compared to the same period of 2024. In August 2023, BLA fighters attacked a convoy of Chinese engineers working on Gwadar Port, killing four Chinese nationals and nine Pakistani military personnel in a two-hour battle. In October 2024, the BLA bombed the Karachi airport perimeter, killing two Chinese citizens. The escalating tempo, geographic distribution, and increasingly sophisticated tactics of these operations, Operation Herof or Black Storm in 2025 involved coordinated simultaneous strikes across multiple targets including security installations, military convoys, railways, and infrastructure, exceed the capabilities that a domestic separatist organisation operating on local resources alone could sustain. The BLA has, by Pakistani government account, received support from Afghan territory. Whether and to what degree that support connects to the broader American covert infrastructure operating across Central Asia is a question that neither Western governments nor their aligned media organisations have investigated with the seriousness its strategic significance warrants. The analytical foundation for understanding these ground-level operations as components of a coherent strategic programme is provided by the United States Naval War College’s own published scholarship. A 2018 article in the Naval War College Review titled “A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China” modelled in precise operational detail how the United States could interdict Chinese energy supply at multiple chokepoints simultaneously. The article described the Strait of Malacca as the primary vulnerability, approximately eighty percent of China’s crude oil imports transited through the narrow passage between Malaysia and Indonesia under 2018 conditions, and assessed the Myanmar-China pipeline as a specific bypass route requiring specific countermeasures. The article stated directly that “a distant blockade also would need to interdict the Myanmar-China oil pipeline, which eventually could move as much as 440,000 barrels per day of crude oil from Kyaukpyu in coastal Myanmar to Yunnan Province in southwest China,” and described how the Kyaukpyu terminal could be “disabled via air strikes, aerial mining, or other kinetic action.” The operational logic of that 2018 assessment maps onto the decade-long pattern of attacks against the Myanmar-China pipeline infrastructure: from October 2021 to May 2025, at least seven major attacks targeted pipeline stations and segments across Mandalay’s Taungtha, Kyaukpadaung, and Natogyi regions and Shan State’s Kyaukme Township. In May 2025, rebel groups launched eight simultaneous attacks on junta positions in Mandalay, leaving a pipeline station undefended; the Irrawaddy reported the junta’s subsequent abandonment of the Chinese pipeline site. The CNPC-operated pipeline carries Middle Eastern and African crude oil from the Kyaukphyu deep-sea port in Rakhine State through central Myanmar to China’s Yunnan province, bypassing the Strait of Malacca entirely, precisely the bypass route that the Naval War College article identified as requiring interdiction in any blockade scenario. Beijing’s “Malacca Dilemma”, the strategic vulnerability first articulated publicly by then-President Hu Jintao in 2003, describing Chinese dependence on the narrow Malacca passage for the majority of its seaborne energy imports as a fundamental security liability, drove the entire Belt and Road Initiative’s infrastructure logic. CPEC’s Gwadar Port, the Myanmar-China pipeline from Kyaukphyu, the proposed railway connections through Central Asia, and the broader BRI port and corridor network across the Indo-Pacific were designed specifically to provide Chinese energy imports with alternative routes that did not depend on American naval access at Malacca. The United States’ 2026 closure of the Strait of Hormuz, as RealClearDefense noted in May 2026, “enlarged China’s Malacca Dilemma by adding to it a Hormuz Dilemma,” since the Persian Gulf was the source of approximately half of China’s imported oil and one-third of its liquefied natural gas. The Trump administration simultaneously struck a defence cooperation agreement with Indonesia granting American warplanes expanded access to Indonesian airspace for Malacca monitoring, and persuaded the British government to abandon the planned handover of the Chagos Islands and Diego Garcia to Mauritius, preserving the American-British strategic base at the Indian Ocean’s geographic centre between the Hormuz and Malacca chokepoints. A power that simultaneously closes Hormuz, secures Malacca monitoring access, retains Diego Garcia, conducts Typhon missile exercises in the Philippines, and supports, through whatever degree of direct and indirect means, insurgent campaigns against the two principal BRI overland energy bypass routes through Pakistan and Myanmar, has operationally addressed, with remarkable geographic comprehensiveness, every element of the Malacca Dilemma that Chinese strategic planners spent two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars attempting to solve. The 2011 article in The National Interest titled “Free Baluchistan,” written by Dana Rohrabacher, then a Republican congressman from California and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia, argued explicitly that an independent Balochistan would serve American strategic interests, specifically noting that Pakistan had given China a base at Gwadar “in the heart of Baluch territory” and that an independent Balochistan “would serve strategic interests in addition to the immediate goal of countering Islamic forces.” The following year, House Concurrent Resolution 125, introduced in the 112th Congress, expressed “the sense of Congress that the people of Baluchistan, currently divided between Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan, have the right to self-determination and to their own sovereign country.” The resolution did not pass, but its introduction in the United States Congress, framing the dismemberment of a nuclear-armed American ally as a matter of Baloch self-determination, represented the most explicit public statement of the strategic objective that BLA operations have since been progressively, if partially, advancing. Afghanistan, carved away from Pakistani influence and destabilised to the point where Chinese investment is deterred; Balochistan, attacked along the CPEC corridors; Myanmar, its BRI pipeline infrastructure struck through insurgent operations, each constitutes a node in the geographic arc through which Chinese overland energy supply must transit if it is to reach Yunnan and Xinjiang without crossing waters that the United States Navy controls. Washington does not require formal acknowledgement of its role in each node to achieve the operational outcome that closing each node produces. The operational picture that emerges from these concurrent campaigns is one of considerable strategic coherence. The 1980s American strategy in Afghanistan, funding the mujahideen to bleed the Soviet Union, as Zbigniew Brzezinski subsequently confirmed he had recommended to President Carter, did not require American forces to fight Soviet troops directly. The mechanism was proxy violence directed at Soviet supply lines, personnel, and political will, sustained over a decade until the costs exceeded the Soviet state’s capacity to absorb them. The current campaign against Chinese BRI infrastructure across Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Myanmar operates on an equivalent structural logic at a smaller scale, combined with the maritime chokepoint strategy that the Naval War College documented in 2018 and that the Hormuz closure and Indonesia basing agreement of 2026 have placed in partial execution. Whether the Chinese state’s capacity to absorb these combined pressures, territorial attacks on its infrastructure investments, deterrence of its commercial personnel, energy supply disruption at source in the Persian Gulf, and maritime access restriction at the Malacca and Malacca-adjacent chokepoints, exceeds the threshold at which the BRI project loses its political and economic viability is a question whose answer depends on variables, including Chinese industrial resilience, domestic political cohesion, and the pace of internal energy transition, that neither the American institutions designing the pressure nor the independent analysts observing it can assess with confidence. What can be stated with confidence is that the strategy exists, well documented, currently operational across multiple geographic theatres simultaneously, and is being conducted with the same institutional continuity that has characterised American grand strategy since the publication of the Wolfowitz Defense Planning Guidance in 1992. Authored By: Global GeoPolitics Thank you for visiting. This is a reader-supported publication. I cannot do this without your support. If you believe journalism should serve the public, not the powerful, and you’re in a position to help, becoming a PAID SUBSCRIBER truly makes a difference. Alternatively you can support by way of a cup of coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/ggtv | https://ko-fi.com/globalgeopolitics | https://buy.stripe.com/3cI5kDdnaeusckjd6Pawo00 References Brian Berletic, “Afghanistan: America’s Other Ongoing Proxy War,” New Eastern Outlook, 11 May 2026, journal-neo.su The Diplomat, “Targeted Attacks on Chinese Nationals in Afghanistan: A Wake-Up Call for Beijing?”, January 2026 - Kabul restaurant attack context; Tajikistan border attacks November 2025 Wikipedia / AP, “2026 Kabul Restaurant Bombing,” 19 January 2026 - 7 killed; 1 Chinese national; 5 Chinese injured; ISKP Aamaq claim confirmed Afghan Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul Mateen Qani, statement to New York Times, 20 January 2026 - ISKP perpetrator confirmed Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun, press conference, 20 January 2026 - 1 Chinese killed, 5 wounded; Taliban urged to protect nationals Afghanistan International, “ISIS-K Claims Kabul Bombing That Killed Seven Including Chinese Citizen,” 20 January 2026 · The Diplomat, “ISKP’s Desperate Attacks Expose Its Weakness,” February 2026 - TIP Uyghur recruitment logic; June 2025 charter shift Special Eurasia, “Islamic State’s Attack in Kabul Against Chinese Nationals,” January 2026 - August 2025 China-Afghanistan-Pakistan BRI trilateral meeting Financial Times, “Bombing Near Railway Track in Pakistan Kills at Least 16,” 25 May 2026 - BLA responsibility; CPEC targeting confirmed BLiTZ, “Quetta Railway Bombing and the Expansion of Baloch Insurgency,” 27 May 2026 - 24 May 2026 suicide car bomb; 30-plus killed; Chaman Phatak crossing; Pakistan PM Sharif in Beijing simultaneously Al Jazeera, “Train Bomb in Pakistan’s Baloch Region: Why Violence Is On the Rise,” 25 May 2026 - 254 attacks 2025; 26% increase; 65% IED increase; ACLED December 2025 Al Jazeera, “What’s Behind Pakistan’s Deadly Balochistan Attacks Which Left 74 Dead?”, August 2024 - coordinated attacks August 2024 pattern News On Air, “Pakistan: 4 Chinese Nationals, 9 Security Personnel Killed in Attack in Balochistan,” August 2023 - Gwadar Port convoy attack RFE/RL, “Rising Violence Threatens Chinese-Funded Projects in South and Central Asia,” November 2024 - Karachi airport October 2024; March 2025 bus bombing; $60 billion CPEC; special police force Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, Balochistan attack data 2025, cited in multiple sources Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), December 2025 conflict report, cited in Al Jazeera US Congress, House Concurrent Resolution 125, 112th Congress, 2012: “Expressing the sense of Congress that the people of Baluchistan…have the right to self-determination” Dana Rohrabacher, “Free Baluchistan,” The National Interest, 2011 - “independent Baluchistan would serve strategic interests”; Gwadar “in the heart of Baluch territory” Irrawaddy, “Myanmar Junta Abandons Chinese Pipeline Amid Resistance Attacks,” 16 May 2025 - 8 simultaneous Mandalay attacks; pipeline station abandoned Irrawaddy / Awn Naw, “Militarized Pipelines: How China’s Security Priorities Harm Local Communities,” September 2025- 7 major pipeline attacks October 2021–May 2025; Taungtha, Kyaukpadaung, Natogyi, Kyaukme, Ann locations GEM Wiki, “Sino-Myanmar Oil Pipeline,” updated February 2026 - Kyaukphyu to Kunming; CNPC-SEAP operator; 440,000 bpd oil capacity US Naval War College Review, “A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China,” Vol. 71 No. 2, Spring 2018 - Malacca interdiction; Myanmar pipeline interdiction; Kyaukpyu air strike/mining scenario New Eastern Outlook, “US Plans for China Blockade Continue Taking Shape,” November 2025 - Naval War College article quoted directly; Myanmar pipeline 440,000 bpd figure RealClearDefense, “Enlarging China’s Malacca Dilemma,” 9 May 2026 - Hormuz closure adds Hormuz Dilemma; US-Indonesia basing agreement; Diego Garcia/Chagos decision Defence Security Asia, “Strait of Malacca Under Pressure: US-Indonesia Defense Pact,” May 2026 - US warship Malacca transit 18 April 2026 Hu Jintao, Malacca Dilemma formulation, 2003, cited in Wikipedia / multiple strategic sources Seymour Hersh, “The Redirection,” The New Yorker, 2007 - US empowerment of Sunni extremist networks; Saudi/Emirati financing New York Times, “US Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” 15 April 2011 - NED/IRI/NDI training programmes New York Times, “CIA Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition,” 21 June 2012 Washington Post, “US-Backed Syria Rebels Routed by Fighters Linked to al-Qaeda,” November 2014 US State Department, “Revoking the Foreign Terrorist Organization Designation of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham,” 2025 Zbigniew Brzezinski, interview confirming Carter-era mujahideen programme, Le Nouvel Observateur, January 1998 Lowy Institute, “Afghanistan Is Surrendering Its Mineral Wealth and Its Future,” 28 April 2026 Bloomberg, “US Freezes Nearly $9.5 Billion Afghanistan Central Bank Assets,” 2021 Brian Berlectic, Washington’s Dirty War on China: From Pakistan & Iran to Afghanistan & Myanmar, 02 June 2026, Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy Global GeoPolitics, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. © 2026 Global Geo-Politics |