I was watching the events that were taking place in the “country of graveyard” on social media. First the surrender of the troops of Afghanistan have baffled me. There were no fight put up by so called 300,000 “trained” troops against the 75000 terrorist. The Afghan government did not also use its Air Force or even sophisticated guns and army. It was a cake walk for Taliban terrorist. I would put a caveat that I am not an expert on IR, military research or war and conflict guy. I am just a simple guy who is confused with events and could not add up all the things.
One thing for sure I believe that this exercise was to delegitimize the Ghani government in the eye of people of Afghanistan and the world. Someone wrote a beautiful movie script behind the scene so people in large believe that government was illegitimate. You can watch see the top official in Biden administration including himself derided the Ghani government.
After the shit shows various report have been propped up saying the government was corrupt, the army was trained by some us contractors, the army personnel were delusional, was not organized, were not paid salary etc. However the same army was sacrificing and holding Kabul for years with minimal support from USA. The same army a year back was also part of rural society of Afghanistan where claims Taliban terrorist comes. So the why the same arm6 could not put a brave fight. At last the army has been denigrated in front of the world.
There seems to be larger conspiracy according to me. This is just a wild guess without any concrete proof. First of all let’s look at oped published in ORF that presents a fact of presence of rare earth metal in Afghanistan is about 1.4 million metric tons. Now let’s look at worlds data. China has the largest presence of rare earth meta of about 44 million metric tons then Vietnam with 22 million metric tons. There is interesting point to be noted that China does not need any investment in Afghanistan to mine these metals. Since mining requires decades of investment. China being sane would not invest in an unstable country. However, one point we are missing that USA has nearly about 1.5 million metric tons of rare earth metals. Therefore USA would be interested in mining it rather than China. Pentagon also reported that availability of lithium was also great in Afghanistan. So it would be foolish of USA not to miss the opportunity and give it to Chinese. According to me after the government stabilizes in Afghanistan American private players would enter the field to mine them.
Many would believe that American would not have leverage-over Afghanistan is making a mistake. However, contrary is true. MEA of India contacted American counter part to facilitate in evacuating the Indian assets. The Indian assets were escorted by the Taliban commander themselves. So coming to point why USA discredited Afghan government? The only answer could be that it was not providing stability in the region. It was observed by the local population as a puppet government of the occupier. Hence USA wanted a stable government in Afghanistan which could be seen as hardline Islamist. From the history it is clear that USA has no problem of dealing with authoritarian government. Also in a democracy it is harder to get things done easily because it would be difficult to crush the protest against the preservation of natural resources. However, in hardline religious society it is easy to crush dissent and get the mining contracts.
