The fiasco of the withdrawal of the USA from Afghanistan will be dissected for decades to come in the military academies and in many of Washington DC's thinktanks. But most people will ponder who ordered this debacle.
The winners are, of course the Taliban, who got a whole country handed to them on a platter, without an insane struggle.
Then there is Pakistan. Actually it's not just Pakistan; it's their army. This quote is so old it barely warrants repeating, but it's true: "Every country has an army, but Pakistan is the only nation where the army has a country".
Laying waste the whole nation
The next winner is the Pakistani army. They have been the most whipped and beaten army in the whole modern world. In 1971 they laid down arms leading to the creation of Bangladesh. And how many did surrender? Well over 93,000 did, so this army has not won a war since the inception of Pakistan.
Apart from these two winners whose only mission is the destruction of Afghanistan, there are others that gain from the Taliban in power.
The Pakistani government is selected by the army, so we can't much call them a government at all. They have no clue why they are in power in the first place, but they enjoy their perks and go.
Then there are the stooges of the ISI, the Pakistan intelligence agency, directing an ever emerging stinking, rotten foam of Jihadis from over 40,000 madrasas all over Pakistan, making best use of them by channeling them into various Jihadi outfits (read about the madrasas in THE TALIBAN: FIGHTING PAKISTAN'S GHOST ARMY). These outfits outdo each other in brutality and destruction, reaching for the podium.
The two now on the podium are TTP (Tekreek e Taliban Pakistan) [2] and ISISK, both ISI creations. These groups are notoriously so bad, that even the Taliban don't say hello to them. Instead they hide and avoid them. Even the Afghan Government found them too radicalized for comfort, so they locked them in Bagram Airbase, ostensibly for eternity.
But now that the Americans are gone, guess who came out of Bagram Airbase prison? And who exploded the first suicide bomb on Kabul Airport? Yes, the ISISK, and no, the K in ISIS doesn't stand for Kids. [3] And the TTP are now in charge of security of Kabul. That's like wow, from damp, rat infested cells straight to golden palaces!
ISISK bombing Kabul Airport had the Pakistanis smiling, as for them even if they take money from the Americans, they wish them dead. It is a mystery why the Americans always make sure they keep the most brutal and radical enemies well funded and armed. But, when the Pakistanis heard TTP got in charge of security, their glee and joy turned to wailing and howling even faster than you can count to three.
And the TTP radicals make the Pakistanis even hotter under the collar by killing two soldiers at a border post. The rest must have run away, because no sane man, wants to fight ISISK or TTP. And before Pakistanis had even picked up their dead and accounted for the rest, TTP declared that the Durand line, which is the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, is meaningless. Now both winners have shown their true colors and it has not even been a fortnight! Both climbed the podium and now are tearing it down, blowing it up. So much for the winners.
Wuhan and the virus
Whatever stories the western media pump out on Afghanistan, it's all made-up hogwash. Not one story is true. Why? For decades China has been pumping cash into the Western media and Western educational institutions, buying up journalists and intellectuals.
Even the entire community of medical researchers are in China's pocket. So when COVID-19 hit, right out of a Chinese military lab in Wuhan built exactly as a Canadian Military lab, the CCP used two senior scientists and over ten trainees to steal vials of viruses and put them in special compartments sewed in socks.
One was caught red handed with vials before boarding an airplane. Nothing was ever reported about it by the legacy media. And any talk of investigations into the origins of COVID-19 has everyone in the media, medical circles or anyone with a voice screaming against it.
Why is that? Isn't China responsible? Why should China not pay? Why shouldn't Xi be removed? Should Xi not be tried tried in the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity? Why not? With all these dead, no one is glancing towards China.
Afghan minerals
Instead they draw attention to Afghanistan, that allegedly has over 3 trillion dollars worth of unbelievable minerals waiting to be trucked away. Firstly if there were so many minerals in the ground, why did the West not stumble and fall face first into it? Why is the entire West waiting to hand over all this on a platter to China ?
What is China's grand plan, based on its thinking? Let me remind you that China doesn't think, the CCP thinks. China buys Russian oil and gas and promised a 400 billion dollar infrastructure project to Iran over 25 years in return for rebated oil prices which are one third of what they pay to Russia. But delivering Iranian oil to China is a problem.
Iran-China oil pipeline
The CCP is looking for ways to snake a pipeline to Iran. Until now the best bet was passing it through Myanmar. They have already built a railway line from Rangoon to China that had its first run yesterday. The CCP wants a very safe and secure oil pipeline and because China has no blue water navy the CCP is afraid of two choking points, the Straits of Hormuz and the Malacca Straits.
And even if it did have a blue water navy, there is no way it can keep these two choke points open. This train from China to Myanmar could bring container traffic to China, but transferring oil from ships to storage tanks, and from there by train to China is not economical and a waste of of time and money. Unless there is a war.
And even if there is a war, which idiot (apart from Biden) would allow China to continue this process? They will bomb the railway bridges on the first night.
The next CCP plan was to pump oil through Gilgit Baltistan [4] (Kashmir) to China. Firstly those mountains are so high that even passenger flights avoid them. Then they are in a highly seismic zone, prone to earthquakes as the tectonic plates move up and sideways. The amount of pumping stations needed to pump the crude up the mountains, is prohibitive. And then there's the perma snow and frost. Not feasible.
Another option is to truck the crude over the mountains. How much crude can one supertanker hold? And a single truck? That's also out of question. So the Gawadar port plan failed. It was at most a grand Chinese Navy base, but that's about it.
Furthermore there is no industry in Pakistan to export, so that is another minus. But Chinese fishing boats are pulling out every last fish from Pakistan's waters, leaving the local fishermen starved and hungry, so that's another plus for China.
But now there's Afghanistan after the Biden withdrawal debacle. As we saw Myanmar and Pakistan are unable to help realize the Grand Chinese Pipeline or a lifeline for super cheap crude oil. But, as Afghanistan has over 100 kilometers of border with China, that pipeline could now easily go straight from the Iranian oil fields through Afghanistan to China.
Now comes the question. Suppose China has an agreement with the Taliban regime for an oil pipeline and the mining of minerals. That will obviously be brokered by the Pakistan army, through the ISI. In this China will have to map the land, clear it, level it, dig the trenches, through all types of terrain and lay the pipeline.
Protection racket
All this while the Afghans or let's say the Taliban, or even directly the local warlords will be lying in the shade watching them work. The manpower will be Chinese, their excavators, bulldozers, trucks, everything will be run by Chinese. These loitering unbathed warlords after their tradition, will demand protection money from China.
That's also how the USA stayed in Afghanistan. Unless you pay the local warlords, you cannot move an inch. Americans were funneling millions of dollars every week to the local chieftains. That's why things were quiet for a long time. The same is the case for minerals. You make a deal and the local warlords come calling for protection money.
If say, there is a copper mine in an area of say warlord 1 and the Chinese are keeping him happy and are extracting ore, trucking it away day and night, will that not make the neighboring warlords 2 and 3 jealous? They will stop the trucks and burn them; they will keep this up until the Chinese are jolted out of their snooze and pay them off too.
After the Taliban grabbed power, any resemblance of a proper source of income ceases to exist. The primary source of income before was, Americans dumping truck loads of dollars at the doorstep of warloards. But do you think CCP will do the same to protect its pipeline and extract the minerals?
The CCP is very miserly with money. So don't expect them to distribute cash by the truckload to these good for nothing Taliban and their stooges. And if China thinks the Taliban will stop this protection racket, they are in for a shock. Sitting in Kabul is one thing, but being hundreds of miles in the interiors of a mountainous region with no allies is quite another.
Cutting the whole story short, it is not likely that these plans about minerals will ever come to fruition. The oil from Iran may be feasible. But even that oil pipeline will be blown up by rival warlords. They will demand more and more, ultimately leading to fighting. And if there's one thing the Afghans love it's fighting, that's what they are good at.
That's an understatement; Afghanistan isn't called the graveyard of empires for nothing! So let's see how the whole show turns out, grab your popcorn and slide in your favorite chair and watch.
By Rajesh Chaudhary
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