An Afghan man holds a small piece of gold, prospected from the site of a proposed Qara Zaghan mine in 2011. Courtesy: CNN
The Afghan-Taliban, after the win over the Ashraf Ghani government have an extremely uphill task, not only internally but also externally, and were to have an expected first counterincentive, as US declared, to further pauperize Afghanistan, that it would freeze the nearly 9.5 billion USD assets of Afghanistan Central Bank , reported Bloomberg on August 18 1 . This came almost all along Internal Monitory Fund (IMF) declaration to starve Afghanistan by withholding the 450 million USD fund after the AT takeover, informed CNN on August 18 2. This move has come as AT government is yet to be recognized, hence, the standstill.
There is yet to be a formal announcement of government in Afghanistan while the world’s entire attention is turning its lenses on it. It would surely take time for the turmoil to settle and a permanent calm and peace to descend, but Afghanistan is to be continuously, put under the scrutiny and probe of the world powers as well as the media-houses. But, now perhaps, what awaits Afghanistan is the proverbial ‘golden-land’, as the long ‘kept-under-warps’ news is now getting into open. CNN on August 19 3 , carried an elaborate piece that ‘the Taliban are sitting on $1 trillion worth of minerals the world desperately needs. It’s also brought renewed focus on Afghanistan’s vast untapped mineral wealth, resources that could transform its economic prospects if ever developed. But in 2010, US military officials and geologists revealed that the country, which lies at the crossroads of Central and South Asia, was sitting on mineral deposits worth nearly $ 1 trillion. Supplies of minerals such as iron, copper and gold are scattered across provinces. There are also rare earth minerals and, perhaps most importantly, what could be one of the world’s biggest deposits of lithium — an essential but scarce component in rechargeable batteries and other technologies vital to tackling the climate crisis. Demand for metals like lithium and cobalt, as well as rare earth elements such as neodymium, is soaring as countries try to switch to electric cars and other clean technologies to slash carbon emissions.’
Copper ore is seen at Aynak in the Logar Province of Afghanistan on March 4, 2013. Courtesy: CNN
With the ouster of US from Afghanistan, it is everyone rightful guess that Russia and China are to come forward with support and may be soon the world might hear that both Russia and China have accepted AT government. Russia had long been supportive of AT and China lately had put its weight behind AT with a promise to invest billions in Afghanistan is exchange of peace. China had sought guarantees from AT over East Turkmenistan Islamic Movement and its Foreign Minister Wang Yi hosted one of the most powerful AT delegation lately. The most obvious beneficiary of this would-be unearthing of precious-minerals, hence therefore has to be China, which is going to be a permanent consternation to US. The call for alarm is already in US and CNBC on August 17 4 , deliberated over the prospects of China going ahead with Taliban to ‘exploit’ rare earth metals, which according to the same report are worth between $1 trillion to $3 trillion as ‘ only hours after the Taliban overran Afghanistan, a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman said Beijing was ready for “friendly cooperation with Afghanistan.’ This will complicate matters for US as ‘China has dominated the rare earths market globally and threatened to cut off supplies to the U.S. during the trade war in 2019. So there should be pressure on China if they are going to do alliances with the Taliban in order to generate economic aid for them — that they do it on international terms.’
China’s most ambitious project of Belt and Road Initiate is most likely to be carved-out of Afghanistan as China wants it to connect with its China-Pakistan Economic Corridor to makes its goods reach Central Asia, Europe, Middle-East and US. It is here China has come aggressively in the picture to thwart the US game-plan, which wants CPEC to die-out ironically endorsed by India too. However, the issue of rare-earth reserves will be of great importance for US as ‘China dominates the rare earths market globally. About 35% of rare earth global reserves are in China, the most in the world. US reserves also pale in comparison to China. The U.S. has a total of 1.4 million metric tons of reserves, versus 44 million metric tons of reserves in China. The U.S. was heavily dependent on China for rare earths in 2019, when the Asian country was exporting 80% of US needs. Therefore, China is all likely to cripple US in the coming days.
Going by what is being debated at the world level, Afghanistan is surely to stride towards progress and will be able to fight its decades of depravation of world resources. It will be able to reconstruct itself from the ‘destruction and killing of millions’ which US brought to it in the last 20 years. By virtue of these hidden and unknown rare treasures of earth, Afghanistan is all likely to be the destination of prosperity and try to climb on the parameters of human development index, as ironically, when the world needed oil, it got discovered under the Arab lands-a century back, and now when the world is in the dire-need of these ‘rare-minerals’, Afghanistan is said to have found it under its minefields! But, as it is said, there are many a slips betwixt the cup and the lip, hence, Afghanistan really going ahead with this project, is again to put it into a hot-soup, as the world powers, with all their might and new ‘divisive-agendas’ are now to gravitate towards it.
If this happens, it would be the game-changer for Afghanistan which has been wrecked to no end by one of the endless wars of US, which had perpetuated then in Vietnam and ended in a Saigon moment in 1975, and now the Kabul moment has happened, but then Taiwan is now brimming for it. Ironically, India has also entered the US bandwagon as had been speculated by The Scribe through an article ‘India upping the ante on Taiwan’ on September 25, 2020.
Let’s see what is to happen next.
The writer is a former UP State Information Commissioner and a political analyst.
References:
1-https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-17/u-s-freezes-nearly-9-5-billion-afghanistan-central-bank-assets
2-https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/18/business/afghanistan-taliban-imf-yellen/index.html
3-https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/18/business/afghanistan-lithium-rare-earths-mining/index.html
4-https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/17/taliban-in-afghanistan-china-may-exploit-rare-earth-metals-analyst-says.html
5- https://thescribe.in/india-upping-the-ante-on-taiwan/
