News Analysis The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hailed its military drills with Russia earlier this month as an assurance that violence from the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan would not spill over the border into China. The drills saw roughly 10,000 troops engage in counterterrorism training exercises in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, home to over 2 million Hui, a predominately Muslim ethnoreligious minority group. Despite the fanfare, experts say that military cooperation between the two nations is not on the same order as the type of cooperation one might expect from the United States and its allies. Further, with the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, both Beijing and Moscow face the possibility of growing instability in an area they consider their backyard—Central Asia—as experts warn that the region could revert to a “pre-9/11” status quo in regards to terrorist threats. Cooperation Based on Sovereignty The China-Russia partnership is “largely …