Afghanistan Crisis: America Out; China In By James Reed
The only sensible explanation of the Afghanistan debacle is that it is a conspiracy to hand over lithium and rare earth reserves, the largest in the world, to China. To my mind Beijing Biden dis this for his Chinese masters. See the video by Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen, who says much the same. This is the tragedy of the West, as it is destroyed from within, as always happens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FlTfuMapFE
“China’s state-run Global Times on Tuesday reported Chinese corporations are excited by the business opportunities in Afghanistan, once the Taliban “stabilizes” its conquered land and eliminates the “uncertainty” holding China’s ambitions in check.
“While much uncertainty remains, given the fluid situation in Afghanistan, there are huge opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation between the two countries, especially in sectors such as utilities and mining, if the country under the Taliban’s leadership pursues peace and development after years of war,” the Global Times wrote, citing eager Chinese executives and analysts.
The article mentioned complaints about slow progress at big Chinese projects in Afghanistan, such as the Aynak copper mine near Kabul, which Chinese companies hold a 30-year lease on. “Safety issues” have thus far prevented the mine from operating.
China also has a stalled $400 million oil field project with a 25-year deal in Afghanistan, plus some $110 million in “infrastructure projects,” a figure the Global Times said surged 158.7 percent last year.
Many of those infrastructure contracts pertain to power generation, including the sort of large-scale coal-fired electrical plants the international climate change movement was told China will stop building any day now.
“As the U.S. is leaving after fighting a war in Afghanistan for years, and there is a major power shift in the country, projects could resume and more win-win cooperation between China and Afghanistan could be launched, if the new Afghan government pursues peace and development,” the Global Times hoped, pointing to the Taliban’s “open attitude toward cooperation with China” as reason for optimism:
During a meeting with Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi in North China’s Tianjin on July 28, Taliban political commission representative Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar said that it would create a suitable investment environment in Afghanistan and he hoped that China would get more involved in bringing peace to Afghanistan and play a bigger role in the country’s future economic development.
The Chinese are still projecting an atmosphere of “anxiety rather than glee” over Afghanistan to U.S. media, as professor John Delury of Seoul’s Yonsei University put it to the New York Times on Wednesday.
Much of that anxiety revolves around the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a terrorist organization regarded as long defunct by U.S. and European intelligence agencies, but portrayed as a massive threat on par with al-Qaeda or ISIS by China. Chinese media frequently cites ETIM as a threat that could become far more dangerous in the chaos of fallen Afghanistan.
Chinese media operations caper with glee over the U.S. debacle in Afghanistan, portraying it as the decisive end of the American “empire,” but then claim to be deeply apprehensive and resentful of the security headaches Washington is foisting on Beijing, ranging from threats to Chinese investments in Afghanistan to fears of the Taliban’s malign extremist influence reaching out to Muslims in China, or a tidal wave of refugees fleeing across the Afghan border.
The Global Times article, however, spotlights the opportunities China sees in Afghanistan, where Beijing rushed to declare its friendship to the Taliban and offer its economic and political assistance to their Islamic Emirate. Chinese media is filled with stories of how Chinese diplomats and businessmen in Kabul are perfectly safe under Taliban protection and have suffered only minor inconveniences from the takeover.
There could be some risks ahead for Beijing, which might have noticed the Taliban is not very good at keeping its promises or following up on declarations of friendship, but Chinese media are playing up their anxieties to distract from the glittering prizes China stands to collect in Afghanistan, prominently including its vast mineral wealth.
“Afghanistan has some of the world’s largest deposits of lithium, estimated to be worth between $1 trillion and $3 trillion. The bad news is that Joe Biden’s decision to pull American troops out of that country has unilaterally—and literally—handed all of the potential bound up in those lithium deposits to Chinese communists,” Nigel Farage noted at Newsweek on Wednesday.
Farage observed the U.S. government invested considerable resources in discovering Afghanistan’s mineral wealth over the past twenty years, with a Pentagon internal memo dubbing it “the Saudi Arabia of lithium,” but now China will get to exploit the immense wealth America mapped out.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/18/business/afghanistan-lithium-rare-earths-mining/index.html
“The swift fall of Afghanistan to Taliban fighters has triggered a humanitarian crisis, with thousands trying to flee the country. It's also brought renewed focus on Afghanistan's vast untapped mineral wealth, resources that could transform its economic prospects if ever developed.
Afghanistan is one of the poorest nations in the world. 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.
"Afghanistan is certainly one of the regions richest in traditional precious metals, but also the metals [needed] for the emerging economy of the 21st century," said Rod Schoonover, a scientist and security expert who founded the Ecological Futures Group.
Security challenges, a lack of infrastructure and severe droughts have prevented the extraction of most valuable minerals in the past. That's unlikely to change soon under Taliban control. Still, there's interest from countries including China, Pakistan and India, which may try to engage despite the chaos.
"It's a big question mark," Schoonover said.
Huge potential
Even before President Joe Biden announced that he would withdraw US troops from Afghanistan earlier this year, setting the stage for the return of Taliban control, the country's economic prospects were dim.
As of 2020, an estimated 90% of Afghans were living below the government-determined poverty level of $2 per day, according to a report from the US Congressional Research Service published in June. In its latest country profile, the World Bank said that the economy remains "shaped by fragility and aid dependence."
"Private sector development and diversification is constrained by insecurity, political instability, weak institutions, inadequate infrastructure, widespread corruption, and a difficult business environment," it said in March.
Many countries with weak governments suffer from what's known as the "resource curse," in which efforts to exploit natural resources fail to provide benefits to local people and the domestic economy. Even so, revelations about Afghanistan's mineral wealth, which built on earlier surveys conducted by the Soviet Union, have offered huge promise.
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.
The International Energy Agency said in May that global supplies of lithium, copper, nickel, cobalt and rare earth elements needed to increase sharply or the world would fail in its attempt to tackle the climate crisis. Three countries — China, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Australia — currently account for 75% of the global output of lithium, cobalt and rare earths.
The average electric car requires six times more minerals than a conventional car, according to the IEA. Lithium, nickel and cobalt are crucial to batteries. Electricity networks also require huge amounts of copper and aluminum, while rare earth elements are used in the magnets needed to make wind turbines work.
The US government has reportedly estimated that lithium deposits in Afghanistan could rival those in Bolivia, home to the world's largest known reserves.
"If Afghanistan has a few years of calm, allowing the development of its mineral resources, it could become one of the richest countries in the area within a decade," Said Mirzad of the US Geological Survey told Science magazine in 2010. He led the Afghanistan Geological Survey until 1979.
Even more obstacles
That calm never arrived, and most of Afghanistan's mineral wealth has remained in the ground, said Mosin Khan, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and former Middle East and central Asia director at the International Monetary Fund.
While there has been some extraction of gold, copper and iron, exploiting lithium and rare earth minerals requires much greater investment and technical know-how, as well as time. The IEA estimates that it takes 16 years on average from the discovery of a deposit for a mine to start production.
Right now, minerals generate just $1 billion in Afghanistan per year, according to Khan. He estimates that 30% to 40% has been siphoned off by corruption, as well as by warlords and the Taliban, which has presided over small mining projects.
Still, there's a chance the Taliban uses its new power to develop the mining sector, Schoonover said.
"You can imagine one trajectory is maybe there's some consolidation, and some of this mining will no longer need to be unregulated," he said.
But, Schoonover continued, the "odds are against it," given that the Taliban will need to devote its immediate attention to a wide range of security and humanitarian issues.
"The Taliban has taken power but the transition from insurgent group to national government will be far from straightforward," said Joseph Parkes, Asia security analyst at risk intelligence firm Verisk Maplecroft. "Functional governance of the nascent mineral sector is likely many years away."
Khan notes that foreign investment was hard to come by before the Taliban ousted Afghanistan's civilian Western-backed government. Attracting private capital will be even more difficult now, particularly as many global businesses and investors are being held to ever higher environmental, social and governance standards.
"Who's going to invest in Afghanistan when they weren't willing to invest before?" Khan said. "Private investors are not going to take the risk."
US restrictions could also present a challenge. The Taliban has not been officially designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the United States. However, the group was placed on a US Treasury Department list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists and a Specially Designated Nationals list.
An opportunity for China?
State-backed projects motivated in part by geopolitics could be a different story. China, the world leader in mining rare earths, said Monday that it has "maintained contact and communication with the Afghan Taliban."
"China, the next-door neighbor, is embarking on a very significant green energy development program," Schoonover said. "Lithium and the rare earths are so far irreplaceable because of their density and physical properties. Those minerals factor into their long-term plans."
Should China step in, Schoonover said there would be concerns about the sustainability of mining projects given China's track record.
"When mining isn't done carefully it can be ecologically devastating, which harms certain segments of the population without a lot of voice," he said.
Beijing could be skeptical of partnering on ventures with the Taliban given ongoing instability, however, and may focus on other regions. Khan pointed out that China has been burned before, having previously tried to invest in a copper project that later stalled.
"I believe they will prioritize other emerging/frontier geographies well before Taliban-led Afghanistan," said RK Equity partner Howard Klein, who advises investors on lithium.”
I find it hard to believe that this was not deliberate. Call me a conspiracy theorist if you like, but don’t call me late for dinner!
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