China Pledges Help in Terrorism Fight

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said, "China seeks to play an active role in Afghan reconstruction and reconciliation."

Boy, those headlines are reassuring, China finally gets it! ...Uh oh, hold on, I thought so, there are some slight wrinkles nearly unnoticeable there in those headlines. It seems it isn't to help the United States, but it's to help Afghanistan. Oh well, it's still a magnanimous gesture towards settling war to bring peace into the region since they share a strategic narrow border. What else could it be, right?--Wrong.

Mao Tse Tung & President NixonThe old saying, "You don't get anything for nothing." is certainly prescient here. It is with that foresight from past Chinese diplomatic encounters since President Richard Nixon discovered that ulterior Mandarin motives always prevail in any Manchurian negotiations. Haven't you ever heard of "saving face"?

Factoid: Afghanistan has asked China on several occasions to open their northern border in the Wakhan Corridor for economic reasons or as an alternative supply route for fighting the Taliban insurgency. Historically, Marco Polo traversed this rugged, deep, narrow valley pass sandwiched between Afghanistan and Chinese provinces considered even today as the only viable land passage in spite of its extremely rugged mountainous terrain. However, China has resisted, largely due to unrest in its far western province of Xinjiang, which borders the Wakhan Corridor that could supply ongoing anti-Beijing anarchists. In December 2009, it was reported that the United States had asked China to open the corridor with no end results. Is that some more of the unreported Obama foreign relations policies successes? 

Afghanistan natural resources: coal, copper, iron ore, lithium, uranium, rare earth elements, chromite, gold, zinc, talc, barites, sulfur, lead, marble, precious and semi-precious stones, natural gas and petroleum. In 2010, U.S. and Afghan government officials estimated that untapped mineral deposits located in 2007 by the US Geological Survey are worth between $900 billion and $3 trillion. 

The biggest find, however, is mining the 1.4 million tons of 'rare earth elements' such as lanthanum, cerium and neodymium in one place. There are 17 rare earth elements which are typically dispersed and not often found concentrated as rare earth minerals in economically exploitable amounts, so that is what is remarkable about Afghanistan.  

 Despite being one of the poorest nations in the world, Afghanistan may be sitting on one of the richest troves of rare earth minerals in the world, valued at nearly $1 trillion. It is in extremely high demand in manufacturing of high tech military hardware, computers and various electronics such as cell phones, television displays and communications which are exponentially growing.

So, China strategically is encouraging new investment of Chinese enterprises to mine these minerals in this land-locked country even with its arid, war-weary devastated countryside from years of Russian occupation with surrounding mountainous terrains. This is really why China is helping to build Afghan anti-terrorism capabilities by training local militia and police with arms and boots on the ground to protect their own national interests such as: 

• In 2007, a Chinese government-owned company paid $3 billion to lease a 2,600-year-old Buddhist site for 30 years and plans to extract over $100 billion worth of copper from the area.

• In 2011, China became the first foreign country in decades to sign a oil exploration deal in Afghanistan when it inked a $7 billion pact.

• In 2013, China announced preliminary talks to construct a direct road link, Wakhan Corridor, to China across the remote 47-mile border between the two countries.

Obama losing shirt in cards with Hu of China.This is part of a trend that has been welcomed by the U.S. officials in the Obama administration. It is interesting that the Obama administration has not raised much fanfare about this U.S. capitulation to the Chinese government by the American people as Afghanistan is bought and paid for by our blood, sweat and treasure. No wonder the Chinese like to deal with the Obama administration.

In the meantime, the United States withdraws its troops as facilities, equipment and municipal infrastructures such as power plants, dams and roads are left behind for the Chinese to use in Afghanistan. After all, China needs them to corner the market on these strategic rare earth minerals to attain military superiority over the United States. Is this another Obama foreign policy blunder or a side deal cut with China to shore up and build up his feeble Obama Presidential diplomatic legacy?

 

Afghan Schoolgirl Teaches Obama World History

 

Malala Yousafzai, don't pay attention to this girl - she had a hole in her head!

That fact is true, but not a reason to ignore her warning on true danger - Pakistani militants aka The Taliban. Malala was feted at the United Nations after a failed head-shot in a Taliban assassination attempt to rid Pakistan of this female scourge pushing for women's fundamental education rights against Sharia Laws. Afghanistan remains one of the worst places on Earth to be a woman, despite billions of dollars in aid and pledges to better their lives. There is now mounting concern that such freedoms will not be protected and may even be traded away as Kabul seeks a peace deal with the Taliban, as most foreign troops prepare to leave the country by the end of 2014.

"Public opinion is confused about the Malala issue. Many people hate Malala," said Zubair Torwali, a newspaper columnist from her home valley of Swat. "Anything here in Pakistan related to the West or America becomes a thing of conspiracy. The Taliban's ideology is flourishing in Pakistan. It is victorious."

The simple truth is that the Taliban are doing as well as they are because they are being supported by Pakistan in Afghanistan. Afghanistan's old ethnic conflict has become a proxy war for the bitter feud between the region's two nuclear powers, Pakistan and India. Like the Israeli-Palestinian issue, the problems between India and Pakistan stem from the ill-conceived and poorly implemented geopolitics of the partition of the British Empire in 1948. And the Taliban are being supported by Pakistan because the Pakistani generals fear being squeezed in an Indian nutcracker, faced with not only a massive Indian presence to their south but a pro-Indian regime to the north in Afghanistan.

The real truth is even more complex. There is not just a proxy war between India and Pakistan, but also Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the US too. So, what lies at the heart of the current war in Afghanistan is the hostility between India and Pakistan, ongoing for more than 60 years and the malign influence of Qatar, Saudi and other vastly rich gulf states on an impoverished Pakistan forcing Salafism onto Islamic believers as the truer pure Islam of the Queran along with violence that strict religious radicalism often brings.

Additionally, Obama has told Afghanis and Pakistanis that the U.S. is and will be leaving in 2014, thereby creating a vacuum relinquishing back the region to the Afghan goverment and Taliban. Will the Taliban get together for a big kumbaya group hug? ...Hmmn, that will never happen because India most likely would be filling the security vacuum left by the US withdrawal, advance its regional interests, compete with its Chinese rival for influence in the country as China hedges mining minerals and resources by investing heavily into the rural populations of mountainous areas, and thwart its Pakistani enemy at the same time. 

Boy, isn't this great news? All of our U.S. "blood and treasures" have been dumped down into this Afghanistan - Pakistan regional rat hole, and for what?  It's certainly not for any form of "Democracy" in Afghanistan or Pakistan, nor in an al Queda "Theocracy" under a totalitarian Islamic regime somewhere. The American people have been "sold a bill of goods" by our Washington politicians to enter a war chasing after the al Queda and a President Obama that cut back pentagon funding so that we ended up just chasing after our own tail - and so, What are the real facts? We certainly did not learn them in U.S. public school history classes. Stupid students. Stupid citizens - Dead soldiers. Sad. 

Afghanistan has deposits of rare earths, gold, copper, iron and other minerals worth an estimated $3 Trillion. The problem is that they are located in one of the country's most dangerous spots, on the south bank of the Helmand River, in a traditional Taliban stronghold. All cell phones need the other rare earth minerals for circuit boards. China produces 97 per cent of the world’s rare earths output. However, it is estimated to hold only 30 per cent of the world reserves.

So now China takes away needed massive mineral deposits while the U.S. walks away with nothing for all of their body bags or military assets and money wasted.

FACTOID: According to a recent Congressional Research Service report, world demand for rare earth metals is estimated to be 136,000 tons per year, and projected to rise to at least 185,000 tons annually by 2015. With continued global growth of the middle class, especially in China, India and Africa, demand will continue to grow. High-tech products and renewable energy technology cannot function without rare earth metals. Neodymium, terbium and dysprosium are essential ingredients in the magnets of wind turbines and computer hard drives; a number of rare earth metals are used in nickel-metal-hydride rechargeable batteries that power electric vehicles and many other products; yttrium is necessary for color TVs, fuel cells and fluorescent lamps; europium is a component of compact fluorescent bulbs and TV and iPhone screens; cerium and lanthanum are used in catalytic converters; platinum group metals are needed as catalysts in fuel cell technology; and other rare earth metals are essential for solar cells, cell phones, computer chips, medical imaging, jet engines, defense technology, and much more.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-09-rare-earth-metals.html#jCp