Thread: Tentacle-spreading Yellow Peril

Russia And China Are Looking To Tap Afghanistan’s $1 Trillion Resource Reserves

Editor OilPrice.com
Sun, September 19, 2021, 2:00 AM

“Nature abhors a vacuum” is a familiar maxim in science. It means that empty spaces are unnatural as they go against the laws of physics.
The saying could equally be applied to Afghanistan, where the end of a 20-year-old war with the United States has resulted in a power vacuum eager to be filled by another global power(s).

As the Taliban re-take government in the country known to have harbored al-Qaeda, the terrorist group that planned and carried out the 2001 attacks in the United States, Afghanistan’s neighbors are poised to take advantage.

Hemmed in by China to the east, Iran to the west and Russia to the north, the landlocked nation is known as “the graveyard of empires.”

Three Anglo-Afghan Wars in the 19th and early 20th centuries, saw Britain fail to extend its control over Afghanistan from its base in neighboring India, and oppose Russian influence there. Six decades later, the former Soviet Union invaded and occupied the country for 10 years, before withdrawing in a humiliating defeat in 1989.

“Russia is clearly interested in [a] consolidated Afghanistan under a stable rule,” NBC News quotes Fyodor Lukyanov, a top Russian foreign policy expert who leads the Moscow-based Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. “It doesn’t matter so much for Moscow who is in charge in Kabul.”

Iran nearly went to war with the Taliban in 1998 after they killed 10 Iranian diplomats, but has since improved ties with the group; it is also one of Afghanistan’s biggest trading partners.

China sees an opportunity to exploit potentially lucrative oil and gas and mining projects which have been scrubbed or delayed by security concerns, a lack of infrastructure and technical issues. The country reportedly has $1 trillion worth of minerals in reserves, including copper, iron, lithium and rare earths (more on that below).

Beijing recently said it would provide the Taliban with $31 million in emergency aid including food and 3 million covid-19 vaccine doses.
All three countries are worried that the withdrawal of US forces will create chaos in the region, ensnaring them in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. Moreover, they are concerned about terrorism once again breeding under Taliban protection.

The country is the deadliest for terrorism on Earth, with both Islamic State and Al Qaeda maintaining presences there.
“[Terrorists] consider Afghan territory as a base to transfer their activity to the states of Central Asia, to Chinese Xinjiang, to the north of Iran, in the direction of India,” Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Security Council, said in an interview with the Russian newspaper Izvestia in August.

China is worried about extremism seeping into the western region of Xinjiang, where the government has detained hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic minorities. Beijing has called on the Taliban to cut ties with terrorist groups.

China eyeing $1 trillion in minerals

China not only wants regional stability (in 2009, 140 people were killed and hundreds were injured in clashes between Muslim Ughurs and Han Chinese in Xinjiang. Beijing uses this incident as justification for repressing the Muslim minority) it is also coveting Afghanistan’s mineral endowment, which despite recent headlines, may not be as rich as advertised.

(A Bloomberg article, one of several like it, states that in 2010, US officials estimated Afghanistan had $1 trillion in unexplored mineral deposits. The deposits may include the world’s largest reserve of lithium, along with vast amounts of rare earths and copper — minerals critical to the global green-energy transition. But as Bloomberg states, flimsy infrastructure in the landlocked country, along with poor security, have hampered efforts to mine and profit off the reserves.)

“With the U.S. withdrawal, Beijing can offer what Kabul needs most: political impartiality and economic investment,” the article quoted a senior colonel in the People’s Liberation Army from 2003 to 2020, who wrote an op-ed in the New York Times. “Afghanistan in turn has what China most prizes: opportunities in infrastructure and industry building — areas in which China’s capabilities are arguably unmatched — and access to $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits.”

Remember China is actively promoting its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a $900 billion program to open channels between China and its neighbors, mostly through infrastructure investments.

The “Belt” part of the Belt and Road Initiative, introduced by President Xi Jinping in 2013, refers to a network of overland road and rail routes and oil/ natural gas pipelines planned to run along the major Eurasian land bridges: China-Mongolia-Russia, China-Central and West Asia, China-Indochina peninsula, China-Pakistan, Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar. They’ll stretch from Xi’an in Central China through Central Asia, reaching as far as Moscow, Rotterdam and Venice.

The “Road” is a network of ports and other coastal infrastructure projects from South and Southeast Asia to East Africa and the northern Mediterranean Sea.

China Belt And Road

An Asia geopolitical expert says that, while the BRI satisfies a number of economic goals for China, including expanding its supply chains, accessing overseas labor, and preventing layoffs when companies run out of domestic infrastructure to build, the over-riding goal is regional influence.

Richard Javad Heydarian, author of ‘Asia’s New Battlefield: The USA, China, and the Struggle for the Western Pacific’, writes:
“Above all, however, it allows China to lock in precious mineral resources and transform nations across the Eurasian land mass and Indian Ocean into long-term debtors. A leading credit rating agency warned [in 2017] warned that the [One Belt One Road] OBOR is “driven primarily by China’s efforts to extend its global influence”, where “genuine infrastructure needs and commercial logic might be secondary to political motivations”.

The result is what one observer aptly described as “debt-trap diplomacy”, since some nations end up piling up unsustainable debts to China.
China’s idea is for Chinese state-owned firms to build the infrastructure, paid for by participating countries. Those who can’t afford it, and that is most of them, are offered inexpensive loans and credit. It’s no different from banks offering rock-bottom interest rates to homeowners whose incomes are below that needed to support a mortgage.

In 2017, when Sri Lanka couldn’t pay off its Chinese creditors, Beijing took control of Colombo, a strategic port, through a 99-year lease. By the end of 2018, nearly a quarter of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt was owed to China — the money accepted for around $8 billion worth of ports and highways planned through BRI.

...remainder of this interesting read here: https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/r...190000074.html