An official Taliban publication warns Australia that it will have to assimilate into a dominant Asia or face the prospect of being overpowered and forced to take population overspill from Asia. The choice is spelt out in the latest issue of an online Taliban monthly magazine, Al Sumud, whose lead article offers a sweeping view of a post-war order in which a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan becomes a moral pivot for a pan-Asian renaissance that will coincide with the decline of Western power.

“The end of European leadership in the world will give the white population in Australia two choices,” according to author, Mustafa Hamid, a former senior al-Qaeda member who in 2001 married an Australian woman with links to Islamic extremists. “They can either return to their motherland in Europe or reconcile with their Asian neighbours.” Otherwise, he warns, a lengthy conflict will ensue in which Australia will be overpowered “by Asian nations that are better armed and more numerous”.

“There is no doubt that the huge growth in the population of Asia, together with its economic and military development, will make Australia into lebensraum (living space) – to use the term used by Nazi Germany as a motivation for territorial conquest” writes Mr Hamid. Asia, Mr Hamid writes, is facing a population explosion “while Australia is nearly empty, apart from scattered groups of white residents”.

Residents are warned to return to their countries of ethnic and cultural origin or face an “unequal conflict”.

These warnings, however, are marginal to the central vision offered in the article – the emergence of a vibrant pan-Asian identity in which Islam, and the Taliban in particular, constitutes a powerful moral and cultural force but not an exclusive one. Its emphasis on pan-Asian political identity rather than pan-Islamic sets it apart from al-Qaeda ideology.  The Taliban article does not call for jihad, although it hints at the possibility of “peaceful Islamic expansion” and the linchpin role in the “Asian Age”, as the author terms it, is ceded to non-Islamic China.