Making Afghanistan Safe For China
Is US blood and treasure making Afghanistan safe for Chinese exploitation? It certainly looks like it.
In December, 2007, China’s state-owned China Metallurgical Group Corp. (MCC) signed a $2.9 billion agreement with the Kabul government to extract copper from the Aynak deposit, one of the world’s largest unexploited copper deposits with an estimated 240 million tons of ore.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) – Afghanistan’s government signed a deal Wednesday with China’s state-owned National Petroleum Corporation, allowing it to become the first foreign company to exploit the country’s oil and natural gas reserves.
The contract, which covers the northeastern provinces of Sari Pul and Faryab, is the first of several such blocks to be put on the market in coming months, Afghan Minister of Mines Wahidullah Shahrani said during the signing ceremony.
Bring the troops home now. Start rebuilding the US not Afghanistan. Let the Chinese make the country safe for exploitation.
7 Responses to “Making Afghanistan Safe For China”
Oh, this can’t be totally accurate, what about all those people that say we only went into Iraq and Afghanistan to steal their resources.
China does this sort of thing. They will go into regions to extract resources and even, “provide their own security”, if necessary. It is what they are doing in the Sudan oil fields. When the Taliban retakes Afghanistan, and, they most certainly will, the Chinese will buy off those leaders as well.
The communists have learned that money talks and BS walks. They have added their own version; “Money and Overwhelming Force talks and BS walks. I am sure that eventually they will be back to just the overwhelming force part. I suppose it’s just a transition. Nothing to worry about.
The Chinese are currently unbeatable in these kinds of contracts because they return more of the commodity price of the extracted mineral to the owners. While these contracts seem to be quite complex, at their most basic level they are this simple, if they find oil or cooper and it is commercially viable to extract it, how much will they pay the owners, the Afghans, for it?
Currently the Chinese are willing to pay the owners nearly twice as much as the various Anglo American companies are.
If the contract process for minerals in the United States were truly open market ones the Chinese would be getting all of them in the US as well. For some reason the process currently excludes them at an early part of the process.
The company I worked for before I was disabled is now organized as a Chinese company and they attempt to marry what the Chinese do well and cheaply, manufacturing the needed equipment for example, and shore up what they do poorly with European and American knowledge, concept and design.
They signed nearly one quarter of a billion dollars in contracts last year in the mineral extraction industry from the US office alone. Most of the contracts are in South America for cooper and cement. But about 50 million dollars worth of it was in the US in precious metals, cooper and cement.
I worked for years establishing the ground work for this, including four years of working in China itself. Currently any company that is not working with the Chinese is losing 90% of the contracts they use to get to companies that are. As I foresaw twenty years ago when I started working with the Chinese.
This has nothing to do with the Chinese or US governments or their foreign policies. It is a simple matter of costs. And like anything it will not last. Just before I had to quit working I had started talking to both the Vietnamese and the Philippians to start them working. The Chinese costs had started going up and I thought we should branch out. My German colleague had started working with the Indians.
The thing I have understood about the Aynak copper deposit is how they are going the copper out of Afghanistan. They would have to reach an agreement with Pakistan or Iran and build a railroad to the Arabian Sea – several 1000 miles. There may be a lot of copper there but it’s a long way from anywhere.
Ron, they could refine the product in Afghanistan, then transport it overland with easement agreements with Tajikistan.
Allen
That’s still a very large distance and I’m not sure that with the ever increasing cost of oil it would be economic to ship even the refined product via truck.
Bring the troops home now.
They should have been brought home a year ago. There’s no excuse keeping our troops in this futile war, and that was true long before the contract with China