New Delhi: Cut through some of the world’s most impossible terrain, a 50-km-long road link between Afghanistan and China built at the behest of the ousted Ashraf Ghani-led Afghan government, but now with the Taliban poised to reap the benefits, is on the overdrive.
According to the latest report of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), “Afghanistan began construction on a $5 million road through the difficult mountainous terrain of the Wakhan Corridor in Badakhshan province connecting Afghanistan and China. As of mid-June 2021, the Afghan government had constructed approximately 20 percent of the road, which is financed entirely by the Afghan government.”
The road building began in 2020.
Very significantly, the SIGAR report quotes a Public Works Ministry spokesperson who said: “China has expressed a huge interest for investment in Afghanistan, particularly in the mining sector, and this road will be good for that, too.”
SIGAR is the US government's leading oversight authority on the Afghanistan reconstruction process and is mandated by law to submit quarterly reports to the US Congress.
The vital road in the Wakhwan Corridor plans to connect Little Pamir, one of Afghanistan’s most remote areas in Badakhshan, with China’s Uighur-dominated Xinjiang province.
Situated at dizzying heights of about 4,000 metres above sea level, Little Pamir is located in the thin sliver-like protrusion—with Tajikistan in the north and Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (PoK) in the south—which shares boundary with Xinjiang.
The road begins at Bozai Gumbaz, at 3,840 metres, and will pass through the 4,923-metre-high Wakhjir pass, one of the two access points along the about 90-km-long border between China and Afghanistan, before opening up in the Chalachigu or Kara-chukur Valley in Kashgar Prefecture, Xinjiang, China.
A direct road link to China will mean development in the backward and very sparsely-populated region in Afghanistan, not to speak of supplies, trade and commerce which will be a boon for land-locked Afghanistan.
With a powerful China among the prime countries that has a good working relationship with the newly-installed Taliban in Kabul, with several Taliban delegations having been hosted at Beijing, the road link will be an opportunity to further promote ties.
For China, the road will offer a huge opportunity to access Afghanistan’s mineral riches and their easy transportation especially in the backdrop of the fact that Afghanistan lacks a modern mining industry and the associated infrastructure.
China has already forayed into Afghanistan’s mining sector. In 2008, a consortium of Metallurgical Corp of China and Jiangxi Copper had taken a 30-year lease for development Afghanistan’s largest copper mine Mes Aynak in Logar province which is estimated to hold copper resources worth more than $100 billion.
Not only is Afghanistan well-known for its bountiful deposits of copper, iron-ore, gold, precious stones, and for natural gas and hydrocarbon deposits, but its deposits of rare earth minerals are believed to be colossal.
But what would interest China the most is the war-ravaged country’s vast resources of rare earth minerals including lithium, a key raw material for making laptop batteries and other electronic items like mobile phones.
Rare earths are indispensable for most existing and emerging energy, scientific, and military technologies, including in the production of modern-day items like computers, laptops, mobile phones, digital cameras, solar panels, electric cars, satellites, lasers, and in making military platforms like fighter aircraft engines.
Today, China, by far, is the world leader in the production of rare earths and metals. Many recent reports allude that China covets its rare earth resources more to achieve its aim of geopolitical dominance and as leverage for use against the West rather than the commercial value.
In 2018, China produced 120,000 tons of rare earth elements, followed by Australia and the US with 15,000 tons. About 80 percent of the elements used by the US are from China, which also controls 90 percent of the global trade in these elements.
