The Taliban have been handed a huge financial and geopolitical edge in relations with the world's biggest powers as the militant group seizes control of Afghanistan for a second time.More about Afghanistan's mineral resources than the Taliban now "owning" them. They are still in the ground with no infrastructure to access them. China could change that.
In 2010, a report by US military experts and geologists estimated that Afghanistan, one of the world's poorest countries, was sitting on nearly $1 trillion (€850 billion) in mineral wealth, thanks to huge iron, copper, lithium, cobalt and rare-earth deposits.
In the subsequent decade, most of those resources remained untouched due to ongoing violence in the country. Meanwhile, the value of many of those minerals has skyrocketed, sparked by the global transition to green energy. A follow-up report by the Afghan government in 2017 estimated that Kabul's new mineral wealth may be as high as $3 trillion, including fossil fuels....
An economics, investment, trading and policy blog with a focus on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). We seek the truth, avoid the mainstream and are virulently anti-neoliberalism.
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Reportedly, you Americans have spent around $2T on the war. Why didn't you guys simply offer the Taliban the $2T -- $1T for the mineral resources and the other $1T for themselves to gorge themselves in orgies and put down their arms. Bet they would have accepted ;)
ReplyDeleteOk, I know -- hindsight is 20/20.
That trillion better be wrapped in a burkha.
ReplyDeleteThe USA could have benefited from Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, but the USA was only interested in opium production, in war profiteering, and in crushing Afghanistan under feminism and the rainbow flag.
ReplyDeleteNow China will move in rapidly. The USA will accuse China of committing “human rights abuses” in Afghanistan, after the USA brutally occupied Afghanistan for 20 years, exterminating countless people.