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.
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 supplied a clarity that many politicians and generals avoided. Pakistan’s role in regional mediation, its improved macroeconomic indicators after an IMF programme and its 2025 mutual-defence pact with Saudi Arabia are genuine gains. A critique that omits them becomes propaganda. However, competence in some fields is not a title deed to the state. Bennett-Jones describes military influence extending through foreign policy, media permissions, business disputes and investment promotion. It is that elected office, courts, journalism and markets become conditional upon security approval. A country may acquire command without acquiring capacity. Soldiers can compel a decision; they cannot by command alone build schools, collect taxes, create trusted courts or make investors believe that contracts will survive the next summons to Rawalpindi.
The Afghan mineral argument curls back towards Pakistan. Army Chief & Chief of Defence Forces chairs the Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC), a civil-military body intended to unlock investment, including in minerals. Bennett-Jones notes the IMF’s concern about opaque decision-making and preferential treatment. Pakistan also has its own resource frontier. Balochistan has supplied gas and strategic depth while remaining its poorest province, amid insurgency, disappearances and deep resentment.
It is, therefore, too comfortable for a Pakistani security analyst (sic) to diagnose a “resource curse” across the Durand Line without examining how extraction, exclusion and coercion have worked at home. Geology is innocent in both countries; institutions decide who receives the rent and who receives the rifle butt. Pakistan’s neighbours are now delivering their own verdict on the security-state method. The country faces an entrenched military rivalry with India, has exchanged strikes with Iran, and has moved from patronage of the Afghan Taliban to open conflict with its former protege.
Kabul’s rulers deny responsibility for the TTP, while Islamabad accuses them of harbouring it. Both claims require scrutiny. What needs no speculation is the strategic reversal: a movement once valued in Pakistan as leverage over Afghanistan now governs an Afghanistan hostile to Pakistan. The Taliban did not give Pakistan strategic depth. They gave it strategic blowback.
The missing history begins before either the Taliban or the mineral contracts. Afghanistan’s communist rulers committed brutal repression after the Saur Revolution, and the Soviet Union bears direct responsibility for its unlawful and disastrous invasion in December 1979.
A serious critique must not exchange Western mythmaking for Soviet innocence. The invasion killed on a vast scale, uprooted millions and internationalised a conflict that Afghans had already begun. Yet it was immediately seized upon by Washington and Islamabad as an opportunity to convert Afghanistan into Moscow’s bleeding wound. The archival record requires precision. Limited American covert assistance to opponents of the pro-Soviet Kabul government began before the invasion, but the evidence does not conclusively establish the popular claim that Washington deliberately lured Moscow across the border.
The declassified record assembled by the National Security Archive warns against that simplification. What is beyond dispute is what followed. In his December 1979 memorandum to Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote of making Soviet involvement as costly as possible and of giving Moscow its Vietnam. Brzezinski’s anti-Sovietism had deep biographical roots, but these should not be turned into inaccurate psychohistory. He was a Polish Catholic emigre, not a Jew driven by Stalin’s conduct while Hitler persecuted Jews.
His diplomat father served in Germany during Hitler’s rise and in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s purges and was later honoured for helping Jews escape Nazi persecution. Poland’s destruction by Nazi Germany and Soviet power helps explain Brzezinski’s worldview. It cannot justify treating Afghans as expendable pieces on a chessboard. Biography may explain a strategist’s hatred; it does not absolve his strategy of its human bill.
General Zia-ul-Haq supplied the indispensable machinery. Washington provided money and weapons, Saudi Arabia matched much of the American funding and supplied religious legitimacy, and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) selected, trained and privileged Islamist clients. The language of holy war was not simply an indigenous eruption of faith. It became an instrument of statecraft. Refugee camps, madrassas, intelligence channels, arms pipelines and transnational recruitment produced a militant ecology whose effects travelled far beyond the Soviet withdrawal. Chronology matters. Pakistan did not join hands with “the Taliban” against the erstwhile USSR, because the Taliban did not exist. The US, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia backed mujahideen factions, disproportionately empowering hardline Islamists.
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. Correcting the name does not reduce responsibility. It shows how today’s monster was incubated rather than magically born.
Pakistan’s later role is documented, not conjectural. The 9/11 Commission Report called the ISI the Taliban’s primary patron; a Human Rights Watch investigation recorded advisers, finance, arms transit and recruitment from Pakistan. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were the only states to recognise the first Taliban regime. The United States cannot escape by saying it never formally created the Taliban. It helped create the military and financial ecology from which the movement arose, celebrated when Soviet troops withdrew and largely abandoned the wreckage. After 2001, Washington returned with overwhelming force, accommodated abusive warlords and spent two decades building what the US special inspector later described as an over-centralised, externally dependent order.
The United States cannot escape by saying it never formally created the Taliban. It helped create the military and financial ecology from which the movement arose, celebrated when Soviet troops withdrew and largely abandoned the wreckage.
Pakistan became a major US ally while Taliban and Haqqani sanctuaries survived on its soil. The final bargain repeated the habit of deciding Afghanistan elsewhere. The 2020 Doha agreement was negotiated between Washington and the Taliban while the Afghan republic was excluded from the deal that fixed the withdrawal timetable. Its collapse in 2021 was not a mineral event.
Saudi Arabia completes the old triangle and illustrates its contemporary afterlife. King Salman remains sovereign, while Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, prime minister since 2022, is the effective ruler. Muhammad Bin Salman’s social and economic reforms are substantial: the religious police have been curbed, women’s mobility expanded and diversification pursued under Vision 2030. Yet political power has become more centralised, not less. The kingdom that once helped finance an international jihad in Afghanistan later used overwhelming military power to shape Yemen, its poorest neighbour.
The Houthis and their Iranian sponsor bear responsibility for grave abuses and attacks on Saudi territory; Yemen’s war cannot honestly be reduced to Saudi aggression. Nor can the Saudi-led intervention launched in 2015 be washed out of the picture. Air strikes, blockade-like restrictions and externally armed factions magnified a civil war into a regional calamity.
The kingdom eventually pursued a truce and talks, proof that policy can change. But the strategic lesson remains: a neighbour treated as a security perimeter will eventually export its insecurity back across the border. Missiles and drones do not respect the distinction between a buffer and a battlefield.
The third ruler is not “Soviet” because the Soviet Union no longer exists. It is Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation and the dominant figure in Moscow for more than a quarter-century. The regimes are not identical: Pakistan retains competitive political loyalties within a military-led hybrid order; Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy pursuing controlled modernisation; Putin's Russia is a personalist authoritarian state fighting a war of conquest. Moral and institutional distinctions matter.
What connects them is a political technology. Each treats the near abroad as a zone in which sovereign neighbours must accommodate the stronger state’s security doctrine. Each concentrates authority by presenting external danger as permanent. Each risks weakening the civilian institutions needed to correct strategic error.
The Soviet invasion tried to secure Afghanistan as a compliant frontier. Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine repeated the imperial grammar on a vastly larger European stage: a neighbour’s independent choice was recast as an intolerable threat, and domination was sold as defence. The UN General Assembly’s demand for Russian withdrawal records how most of the world judged that claim.
Russia’s unhappy neighbours include not only the Ukrainians burying their dead but Georgians living with Russian forces in breakaway territories, Moldovans facing the frozen conflict in Transnistria, and Baltic societies shaped by memories of occupation. Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen produced a hostile armed power on its frontier even as Riyadh sought later de-escalation. Pakistan now confronts a Taliban government and TTP infrastructure across the very border where strategic depth was supposed to protect it. Unhappy neighbours are not proof of strategic strength. They are often the audit report of failed statecraft. This comparison is not an argument against national security.
Pakistan faces real terrorism; Saudi civilians face real missiles; Russia too has legitimated security interests. The question is whether security is strengthened when the state nurtures proxies, silences institutional challenge and demands obedience from weaker neighbours.
The record says otherwise. Selective militancy does not remain selective. A press managed for morale cannot tell rulers when a policy is failing. Courts made subordinate to stability cannot protect contracts or legitimacy. A neighbour deprived of agency does not become loyal; it becomes resentful, opportunistic or violent.
None of this absolves Afghans. The Taliban are responsible for authoritarian rule, the erasure of women from education and public life, persecution, violent repression and the shelter afforded to armed groups. Afghan communist leaders, warlords and profiteers carry their own guilt. A multicausal history is not moral evasion; it is the only defence against assigning all blame to Afghans after outsiders have finished using them.
Nor does criticism require humiliating Pakistan. The wiser way to project the country is not to pretend that its institutions have no memory. It is to show that Pakistan can learn. The doctrine of rejection of freelance jihad should become a permanent doctrine applied without exception, not a slogan used only against militants who turn their guns inward. Parliament, courts, provinces and journalists should be allowed to test security policy before war performs the audit. Relations with Afghanistan should be based on enforceable counter-terrorism commitments, trade and mutual sovereignty, not clients and coercion. Investment in Balochistan and Afghan minerals alike should rest on consent, transparent contracts and a visible local share of the gains.
Washington and Riyadh owe comparable candour about the jihad they financed. Moscow owes more: acknowledgement of the Soviet invasion and an end to the doctrine that neighbours exist to absorb Russian insecurity. Afghanistan’s resources may yet become instruments of a new predation, and the Dawn article is right to warn against that outcome. But it identifies the possible accelerant as the original fire.
Afghanistan’s first curse was not copper, lapis or lithium. It was the conviction of powerful men that a smaller country could be burned to secure a larger one. That conviction produced the Taliban, destabilised Pakistan, returned violence to Saudi Arabia’s frontier and survived the USSR in Putin’s Russia. Copper did not arm the mujahideen. Lapis did not construct the madrassa-jihad complex. Lithium did not install the Taliban. States did and their neighbours are still paying.