The United States has lost Afghanistan’s mineral wealth but it may not matter
President Joe Biden has inflicted the greatest damage to American honor and influence in recent memory with his botched extraction of troops from Afghanistan. However, along with tens of billions of military equipment, Afghan allies, and even some American citizens, Biden is leaving behind in excess of $1 trillion in mineral wealth that resides beneath the surface of that war-torn land.
Canada’s Fraser Institutes reports that American experts discovered that Afghanistan has an abundance of lithium, used in batteries that run everything from smartphones to electric cars, and rare earth minerals that are used in just about every high-tech product that runs human civilization. Those products include “cell phones, televisions, hybrid engines, computer components, lasers, batteries, fiber optics, and superconductors. “
The problem with getting at Afghanistan’s mineral wealth is three-fold. The country lacks the infrastructure of roads and railroads to support a mining industry. Insurgency has traditionally been a part of Afghan politics. The Northern Alliance fought against the Taliban government in the 1990s. The Taliban fought against the American-supported government after 9/11. Now, a new Northern Alliance is forming to fight against the resurgent Taliban government. Lastly, whatever government rules in Kabul has been rife with graft and corruption.
Stability and the rule of law are crucial for attracting foreign investment. Neither has ever existed in Afghanistan.
Currently, China is moving to fill the power vacuum that Biden has created and is forming alliances with the Taliban. Beijing is clearly after Afghanistan’s mineral wealth with a goal of adding to its near-monopoly of rare earth minerals and lithium. But, as Weifeng Zhong, of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, writing for The Hill, suggests, China will likely run into some of the same problems that the United States faced developing a mining industry in Afghanistan.
One advantage that Beijing has with the Taliban is that it could care less whether Afghan girls go to school, unlike the Americans. The Taliban can abuse the Afghan people to its heart’s content as long as China gets those fat mining contracts. China has a common border with Afghanistan, so with the construction of a belt and road network, it could ship extracted minerals out with fewer problems than the United States.
On the other hand, China has been traditionally ham-handed when it comes to dealing with cultures that it feels are “inferior,” especially Muslims. Beijing’s Nazi-like oppression of the Uighurs is a case in point. Thus, like the British, the Soviets, and now the Americans, the Chinese may find Afghanistan hard to swallow.
Weifeng Zhong also suggests that the United States is already looking for sources of lithium and rare earths outside of China. California’s Salton Sea is proving to be a great source of lithium that could be extracted if methods could be found that would pass muster with that state’s stringent environmental regulations. Last year, Reuters reported that several companies are racing to develop rare earth sources outside of China.
Farther in the future, the moon may become a source of abundant rare earths. A couple of years ago, then NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine suggested that companies could mine rare earths as well as platinum-group metals from the moon later this century. Mining the moon is one motivation of the Artemis return-to-the-moon program. China is also headed to the moon to get at lunar resources.
The United States will be fine, in the long run, even after losing access to Afghanistan’s abundant mineral resources. The Afghan people are the biggest losers as a result of President Biden’s self-inflicted defeat. Besides falling, once again, under the rule of barbaric Sharia law, the Afghans will be denied the benefits that a mining industry would entail. The royalties from rare earth mines could fund many social services and other industries that might have enriched the Afghan people in ways that are beyond evaluation. But it looks like the people of that troubled land are doomed to poverty and oppression for the foreseeable future.
Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space and politics, has published a political study of space exploration entitled Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon? as well as The Moon, Mars and Beyond, and, most recently, Why is America Going Back to the Moon? He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner. He is published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Hill, USA Today, the LA Times, and the Washington Post, among other venues.
