U.S. taxpayers helping fund Afghanistan’s Taliban? Aid workers say they’re forced “to serve the Taliban first”

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Taliban militants dancing (file photo)

CBS News: “We have to serve the families of the Taliban police commanders, governors and other people who they ask us to serve specifically,” one aid worker at UNHCR told CBS News on the condition of anonymity. “Once a Taliban governor told one of our subcontracted aid agencies that 15% of the aid must go toward his guards and other Taliban personnel, and it is now a norm to serve the Taliban first and then serve the ordinary civilians.” Click here to read more (external link).

4.2 Magnitude Earthquake Hit Afghanistan’s Faizabad

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Khaama: An earthquake of 4.2 magnitudes hit 32 km north of Faizabad city of Badakhshan province of Afghanistan on Sunday. The earthquake of 4.2 magnitudes occurred at 10:40 pm local time, 10km depth on Sunday with the epicentre of Raghistan, Badakhshan province of Afghanistan, the Indian National Center for Seismology reported.  No causalities have been reported so far.  Click here to read more (external link).

ISIS Using Afghanistan As Terror Base: Leaked Pentagon Documents

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Khaama: Afghanistan has become a significant coordination hub for the Islamic State as the terrorist organization plans attacks across Europe and Asia and engages in “aspirational plotting” against the U.S., a leaked Pentagon document revealed. According to a classified Pentagon assessment that portrays the threat as a rising security concern, less than two years after President Biden withdrew U.S. personnel from Afghanistan, the country has developed into a significant coordination hub for the Islamic State as the terrorist organization plans attacks across Europe and Asia and engages in “aspirational plotting” against the United States, Washington Post reported. Click here to read more (external link).

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Pakistan Pashtuns Have Doubts About New Military Offensive Against Islamist Radicals

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Pir Zubair Shah
VOA News
April 23, 2023

WASHINGTON — Pakistan is bracing for a new military offensive that is expected to target militants in the northwest as ethnic Pashtuns in the area say they are still looking for accountability for the army’s last offensives in the region, in 2014 and 2017.

The country’s national security committee, comprising top civilian and military leaders, has not said when the operation will start. When announcing it earlier this month, the committee described it as a nationwide anti-militant operation to halt a rise in attacks on security forces by the Pakistani Taliban and other extremist groups.

Pakistan’s government has said that previous operations led to a drop in terrorist attacks; however, Pashtun civil society members and peace activists say it came at a steep cost to many innocent people.

“The generals and those involved in bringing back armed men [militants] to the area haven’t been arrested and have not [been] held accountable. … We will oppose any [new] operation,” an elected member from South Waziristan, Ali Wazir, told Parliament on April 7 after the government disclosed its intentions for another offensive.

Rights activists say previous military-led operations in their region killed tens of thousands, displaced millions, destroyed towns and market centers, and led to the creation of a harsh security law that gives the armed forces sweeping powers in the whole province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, including the former federally administered tribal areas.

Wazir is a household name in Pakistan for his opposition to extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, illegal detentions, landmines and the Taliban’s shadow rule in the Pashtun region. He was in jail for half of his 60-month term in Parliament, purportedly for his opposition to Pakistan’s former chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa.

Earlier this month, Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif responded to Wazir’s opposition by saying he would work to assuage local fears over the operation.

“I want to tell members from Waziristan that their concerns will be heard, and they will be answered,” the prime minister said on the floor of the lower house.

Defense Minister Khawaja Mohammad Asif also supported the stance of the Waziristan members of Parliament and told the house that “they [MPs] are right in saying that those people [involved in talks with militants] should be reckoned with.”

News spreads fear

Leaders and activists of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM), a nonviolent Indigenous organization with serious reservations about the army’s series of operations, are skeptical of the motive and timing of the announcement of the new operation, which could come during an election year and would be the military’s first offensive since the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan.

“The announcement of yet another military operation has indeed spread fear among locals because what they saw in the past operations was they were the ones who suffered the most,” said Idris Bacha, a civil rights activist from Swat and the leader of a local movement, the People’s Resistance Against Militancy.

“Someone needs to tell us, what did they achieve in the previous campaigns? 80,000 people have been killed, whole villages destroyed, and their bazaars lay in ruins. They don’t want to see that happen again,” Bacha told VOA.

Marvin Weinbaum, a longtime regional analyst with the Washington-based think tank Middle East Institute, shares Bacha’s concerns.

“I am very skeptical that there will be anything like a campaign they had in 2014, when they pushed them out of North and South Waziristan. I am skeptical of that in part because [of] the feelings in the tribal areas where they suffered terribly when that campaign was on its way. Many, many thousands were evicted from their homes. They became refugees.”

Other activists have gone further, saying they will actively oppose a military campaign.

“We are united against another war in our area. The military can force us to leave our houses again, but we won’t leave them on our own will,” South Waziristan writer and social activist Shehrayar Mehsud told VOA in a Twitter Spaces conversation.

Pakistan economy

Others see a financial benefit in launching such an operation as Pakistan waits for another major International Monetary Fund bailout loan.

“We have said it before that in the past whenever Pakistan needed money, they would launch an operation in Pashtun areas to get funds from abroad,” said Mir Kalam Wazir, a former provincial legislator and PTM supporter from North Waziristan.

“Looks like it’s the same this time, too. With Pakistan’s difficult economic situation, they need funds, especially from the U.S.,” Wazir continued.

The U.S. gave Pakistan billions of dollars during the height of the war on terrorism, but aid dropped off sharply during the Trump administration. Last year, the total reported U.S. aid to Pakistan was around $150 million.

That drop in aid and the departure of foreign troops from Afghanistan have led some to question whether Islamabad has the capacity to carry out an offensive while its economy is under severe strain.

Pakistan hopes the suspended IMF bailout package will resume so it can avoid defaulting on its debt obligations. The IMF has stalled its $6.5 billion program since November, while a bruising political battle rages between the sitting coalition government and former Prime Minister Imran Khan.

“We are talking of a campaign which is very expensive, at a time when Pakistan is struggling to read its bills, particularly its debt obligations,” Weinbaum told VOA.

Chinese Face Steep Hurdles to Exploit Afghan Lithium, And They Know It

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Lithium

Michael Hughes
AOPNEWS
April 22, 2023

China will face stiff technical, geological, logistical, and market challenges in trying to extract lithium profitably from Afghanistan, in addition to the obvious security problems, primarily in the form of ISK terror attacks. However, Beijing is certainly not approaching the situation naïvely. In fact, China may be fully willing to absorb significant losses to meet broader geopolitical goals.

Afghanistan sits atop massive untapped mineral deposits, which the USGS and Pentagon, after refreshing detailed Soviet studies, estimated in 2007 at $1 trillion. This includes a site in Ghazni province with a deposit the size of the Salar de Uyuni find in Bolivia, which holds 5.4 million tons of lithium.

With the entire globe racing to reach net zero emissions by 2050, demand for electric batteries has sent lithium prices soaring to all-time highs in recent years. Not to mention, the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecast significant shortfalls in lithium by 2040. Current production would have to jump four times to meet demand. In April of 2022, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the price of lithium had gone to “insane levels” over the past decade – jumping by a factor of 17 – from $4,450/ton in 2012 to $78,000/ton in 2022.

Hence, it sounded like good news for Afghanistan that China wants to take the first crack at the massive lithium deposits. The Afghan mine ministry last week said Chinese company Gochin expressed interest in investing $10 billion on a lithium venture, claiming it could lead to 120,000 direct and one million indirect jobs. However, there are many good reasons why Afghans should remain skeptical despite what appears to be a huge opportunity.

Some experts have not only mocked the U.S. $1 trillion estimate as absurd but doubt the minerals have any value. In 2017, Adam Smith Institute Fellow and economist Tim Worstall, in a piece for Forbes, gave his own back-of-the-envelope calculation and projected that the reserves were worth roughly zero. In fact, the Afghan Ministry of Mines and Petroleum told this journalist in the same year that “there is little to no information on the proven economic viability of these resources.”

Two years ago, Rick Valenta, a professor at the University of Queensland’s Sustainable Minerals Institute, said closer inspection cast doubt on the 2007 survey of lithium deposits in Afghanistan. He said drilling in 2010 commissioned by USGS found a range of lithium levels “about three orders of magnitude less” than the lithium concentrations in South America. In other words, Afghanistan may not be the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” as an internal Pentagon memo described it. Apparently, the US comparison of Afghanistan’s deposits to those in Bolivia were based on deeply flawed assumptions.

“So it wasn’t just a near miss, it was way off,” Valenta told Mining Technology.

And the tricky thing about commodity prices is their cyclicality. When a commodity gets too costly, the market adapts and looks for alternatives. And this is already occurring with lithium. As of Friday, the China spot price of lithium carbonate sat at $23,282/ton, down 70% from a year ago amid a slowing in electric vehicle demand. This means Afghanistan’s lithium reserves were worth $421 billion 12 months ago, and are now worth roughly $108 billion (assuming extraction costs of zero).

Meanwhile, more reserves of lithium are being found every year.  In March, Iran found a deposit containing 8.9 million tons of lithium and India reported discovering a deposit with 5.9 million tons. It turns out the shortage is not in lithium per se – the shortage is in mining capacity and the ability to get the stuff out of the ground without going bankrupt. 

And then there are the technical complexities. It typically takes around 15 years to go from exploration to market, according to an IEA study. Moreover, Afghanistan poses unique problems, including the fact it will be logistically challenging to bring product to market from a landlocked country with limited transport and power infrastructure. 

And let’s not forget that China in 2007 won the right to extract copper at Mes Aynak, a large mine in Logar province. China Metallurgical Group Corporation (MCC) inked a $2.8 billion deal for a 30-year lease. MCC reportedly spent $371 million toward developing the area, but work halted amid security issues and corruption allegations.

Then again, it is worth noting that China does not view such projects through purely capitalistic eyes. This is a resource nationalism play. They are willing to absorb some costs in order to corner the market. UBS forecast that China’s ramp up of lithium extraction could see it accounting for nearly a third of the world’s supply by mid-decade. And they have better lithium prospects in Africa and South America than Afghanistan to boot.

In the end, Beijing also sees it in the context of the broader superpower competition, regardless of the outcome. Even if the Chinese fall short of plan, they have prevented rivals like the United States from gaining access to Afghanistan’s lithium. In that sense, this particular battle is already won.