Afghanistan is not cursed because copper lies beneath Logar, lapis beneath Badakhshan or iron beneath Bamiyan. It has been cursed by political choices made in Moscow, Washington, Islamabad, Riyadh and Kabul and by the refusal of those who made them to accept responsibility.  Dr. Raashid Wali Janjua’s ‘Resource curse’, published in Dawn, reverses this chain of causation. It presents a country broken by invasion, proxy war and ideological engineering as though geology had condemned it to factionalism. Minerals may finance Afghanistan’s next struggle. They did not create its present catastrophe. The article raises real concerns: opaque mining, environmental destruction, child labour, forced displacement and the concentration of revenue in Taliban hands. Its error is to confuse a possible future mechanism of predation with the historical cause of Afghanistan’s ruin. A resource curse normally describes an economy already dependent on large resource rents. 

Afghanistan’s much-advertised trillion-dollar mineral figure is a speculative valuation of deposits, many unproven or commercially inaccessible. Ore still under mountains cannot appreciate a currency, finance a rentier state or crowd out manufacturing. Afghanistan is a war-damaged, aid-dependent state facing a grave risk of resource capture, not yet a textbook petrostate without the petroleum. The economics is also inverted. Dutch disease does not arise because inflation creates a “high cost of imports”. A large foreign-exchange inflow normally appreciates the real exchange rate: imports become cheaper while agriculture and manufacturing exports become less competitive. That distinction is not pedantry. It separates an identifiable mechanism from an all-purpose metaphor for misgovernment. 

The article’s invocation of UN Security Council Resolution 1173 is equally misplaced. That resolution imposed targeted measures against National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA)’s illicit diamond economy during Angola’s civil war; it did not establish a general rule under which foreign mining in any badly governed country attracts international censure. Nor can Islamic State–Khorasan Province (IS-K), al-Qaeda, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) and Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) be swept into an imagined entente cordiale with the Taliban. A catalogue of acronyms is not a causal analysis. The article sees customs posts, mines and Afghan factions but lets the states that built the conflict economy fade into the scenery. Strategic depth is renamed geology.

The Taliban emerged in 1994 from the ruins left by that war, the fratricidal conflict among former mujahideen and the religious and logistical networks centred in Pakistan.

The Taliban emerged in 1994 from the ruins left by that war, the fratricidal conflict among former mujahideen and the religious and logistical networks centred in Pakistan.

That evasion is especially striking when read beside Owen Bennett-Jones’s recent article in the London Review of Books. Bennett-Jones asks the question that the mineral thesis avoids: who governs Pakistan? Constitutionally, President Asif Ali Zardari is head of state and Shehbaz Sharif is prime minister. In the distribution of effective national power, Bennett-Jones argues, someone else matters. 

The 27th Constitutional Amendment created a chief of defence forces commanding all three services and granted lifetime legal protection attached to the five-star rank, while constitutional cases were shifted from the Supreme Court to Federal Constitution Court (FCC). This is not a barracks coup. It is something more durable: military primacy constitutionalised through civilian forms. The point can be made without personal abuse and without denying civilian failure. Pakistan’s politicians have often been accused of being incompetent, inefficient, corrupt, dynastic, administratively feeble and willing to hand hard tasks to the army. The armed forces have fought murderous insurgents and paid for it in blood. 

Bennett-Jones also credits Field Martial Syed Asim Munir with ending much of the old ambiguity about jihadist violence. By declaring that only the state may proclaim jihad and calling the TTP Khawarij, he has........

© The Friday Times