Karim Khurram, former chief of staff to President Hamid Karzai, warned on Sunday that Afghanistan risks becoming the latest arena for global power rivalry unless it forges national consensus and rebuilds legitimate institutions.

Posting on X, Khurram likened the country’s current impasse to a “time bomb” ready to explode.

“The 21st century is the century of US-China rivalry, just as the 20th century saw US-Soviet competition, and the 19th century witnessed British-Russian contest,” he wrote on 25 May. He argued that China now stands as America’s principal challenger and that successive US administrations from Obama through Trump to Biden have pursued a consistent strategic stance towards Beijing, differing only in tone.

Khurram recalled President Obama’s observation that the US-China relationship would define the century. He said that Afghanistan, buffeted by great-power conflicts in previous centuries, again faces a similar fate owing to its strategic location and that Afghans have historically been pawns, not players, in those rivalries.

He contended that if Afghanistan had maintained active international engagement and preserved its legitimacy, it might have leveraged today’s global competition to its advantage. Instead, suspension from global institutions and severe domestic disunity have left the country vulnerable.

Khurram cautioned that growing isolation among citizens threatens to detonate the “time bomb” he described. He identified the nation’s lack of scientific capacity, economic weakness and absence of a credible defence as critical barriers preventing Afghanistan from asserting itself in 21st-century geopolitics.