Afghanistan: China edges closer to Afghan riches

China has once again offered the Taliban support in the economic development of Afghanistan. Chinese state-owned media has reported Chinese officials of holding smooth talks with a Taliban delegation.

As the US and other Western forces pullout from the war-torn country and are threatening to impose sanctions while stopping all aid, China is cashing in on the entire situation. Wanting the Taliban to crackdown on groups that support the Xinjiang resistance and wanting them to give control of the Afghan rare-earth metal mines and especially the lithium rich regions, China is doing whatever it can to remain on the Taliban’s good side.

China, the region’s only country that has taken no Afghan refugees has been on a mocking spree against the US and other allies for not taking in enough people. It is part of China’s propaganda campaign that is obsessed with everything the US does, just to fool the regional masses unaware of the entire facts.

It will take time for the Taliban to develop a sense of statehood and their interest, and all the regional powers, especially China are wishing to delay that development as before that they can invest little, build roads and build some buildings while extracting billions of tons of rare-earth metals and other precious resources.

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China is eyeing to establish the Afghan belt of its BRI project that has them inject billions of dollars in loans to poorer countries who then go on to develop various sectors of society while lending strategic and precious areas to China for extraction of materials or control trade.

With Afghanistan’s addition to the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s CPEC (which is a vital part of the BRI) with neighboring Pakistan will lose its strategic importance and China would then focus on getting supplies to the Middle East and Europe through Afghanistan rather than fully rely on Pakistan’s Gwadar Port that has been leased to China until 2053.

China is also hoping the Taliban to move the economy to rare Earth metals instead of the traditional methods. Rather than invent and set up manufacturing bases, China wants from the Taliban, like it wants from other countries, a base that assembles its tech and not manufacture or invent it, as that would birth non-Chinese competition which it is most afraid of as it is something it cant control. China would make Afghanistan a vital trading hub that buys everything from China and sells it in the domestic markets and supply it to the Middle East and Europe. Something which it has done with Pakistan and is doing in Africa.

From garlic, to mobile phones, to vital electronics, machinery, to reservoirs, plastics, filaments, building materials, vehicles, steel, rubbers, fertilizers, etc. Everything in Pakistan comes from China and has killed almost all of the local industry which has moved from inventing to selling Chinese products, everyone now in Pakistan is a trader.

Instead of inventing and produce locally what they had done since the country’s inception, Pakistan’s population now relies on Chinese imports which were up to $12.49bn in 2020, down from about $15bn in 2017 since Imran Khan’s government took over in 2018.

Pakistan’s exports to China were at $1.87bn in 2020.

Trade with China has been closely monitored by Imran Khan’s government who promised to make Pakistan debt-free and end the deficits plaguing the country. But with the regional situation deteriorating and the country embroiled in domestic issues, Khan had to backtrack from his earlier stances and tilt completely towards China, so much so that the current account deficit with China is going up again, and Beijing not liking Khan’s earlier decisions too has taken a more formal stance with Pakistan rather than the traditional “deeper than the deepest oceans, higher than the highest peaks of the Himalayas” friendship.

China has put the West in a tricky situation. Blocking trade with Afghanistan would make the country put all the eggs in China’s basket, and just like with Pakistan, China will take over Afghanistan economically and then politically when the country’s leaders will be too afraid to move away and ignite freedom.

Just like Pakistan, if Afghanistan too loses the sight of having interests, then we will see Afghanistan turn into another economic playground for China, injecting the country with aid and Chinese-made products and leaving the system no other choice but to side with it and call everything else foreign propaganda while going after those reporting the hard but honest truth that the country would be too afraid to talk about.