Dr. Lawrence Sellin is a frequent Gateway Pundit contributor, a COVID-19 subject matter expert, a retired Colonel of the US Army Reserve and Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran.
Earlier this week Dr. Sellin went on with India’s CNN News 18 to discuss the crisis today in south Asia.
Dr. Sellin described the major geo-strategic shift we are facing.
Due to a power vacuum created by the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, South Asia is on the cusp of a major geopolitical shift due to the alliance of China, Pakistan and the Taliban.
China seeks to replace the United States as the global superpower for which economic and military domination of South Asia is an essential step.
China aims is to dominate South Asia, first economically based on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and then militarily using its alliance with Pakistan to establish military bases in Balochistan province on Pakistan’s Arabian Sea coast.
Those bases would provide a critical link between China’s military facilities in the South China Sea and its naval base in Djibouti, a choke point at the entrance of the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.
Chinese naval and air bases in Balochistan would control the vital sea lanes of the Arabian Sea and threaten another strategic chokepoint, the Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the oil-rich Persian Gulf.
The Taliban have already announced that China will be its main financial backer, its principal exploiter of Afghanistan mineral resources and the vehicle by which Afghan products can reach global markets, presumably via CPEC.
To counter attempts by China to achieve regional economic and military hegemony and prevent the use of Islamic terrorism as an instrument of Pakistan’s foreign policy, the Quad nations of India, the United States, Japan and Australia must provide the core of a multi-national effort to strategically disrupt the plans of the China-Pakistan Axis.
Such a policy would combine traditional containment and other active measures including economic sanctions, support for anti-Taliban forces or ethnic self-determination movements, as in Balochistan to disrupt CPEC and China’s plans for military bases there. We must also retain the option of surgical military strikes as part of a counter-terrorism program.
The efforts should be directed primarily against Pakistan because it is both the epicenter of regional terrorism and the weak link in the China-Pakistan Axis.
