Mineral bounties

THERE is a new(ish) game in town and it is called the scramble for ‘critical’ minerals. In a world dominated by microchips and digital gadgets, and in which capitalism is greening itself through the so-called energy transition, minerals like lithium, silicon and gallium are more coveted than ever. The desire to control critical minerals is increasingly at the heart of geopolitical conflict.

In large parts of the post-colonial world, natural resource endowment has been a curse for local populations rather than a blessing. Most of sub-Saharan Africa has been pillaged for its resources, while in Pakistan, Reko Diq and Saindak offer examples of how rich-resource regions and local populations never benefit from mineral riches. As per the evolving geostrategic logics of the global order, our militarised ruling class is priming itself to preside over a new round of mineral extraction in peripheries like Balochistan, KP and Gilgit-Baltistan.

While hosting a galaxy of global investors at a high-profile conference in Islamabad earlier this week, the prime minister insisted that critical mineral exploration offered Pakistan a shortcut out of its perennial debt trap. In parallel, the new US secretary of state Mark Rubio emphasised in a phone call to his Pakistani counterpart Ishaq Dar that Pak-US relations could improve if Islamabad grants Washington access to Pakistan’s deposits of critical minerals.

While officialdom here never needs legal cover for resource grabs at the behest of imperialism, it is worth noting that amendments to the KP Mines and Materials Act have rather suddenly been proposed in a hush-hush manner to pave the way for a ‘development’ miracle that suits global capital and local contractors alike.

Natural resource endowment has been a curse for local people.

For context, in 2023 the US Department of Energy published a Critical Minerals list, including the ‘electric 18’ minerals that Washington believes will be at the heart of the struggle for control over the global economy in decades to come. While the entire world is up in arms about the Trump administration’s tariff wars, especially against China, bear in mind that Joe Biden had already launched a chip war against China in 2022. Washington imposed stringent limits on the exports of any material to China, including silicon, used in the design and production of chips, which today are the essential intermediate goods in virtually all everyday consumption items, including mobile phones and cars.

Crucially, AI and advanced weapons systems are also reliant on cutting-edge chip technology — and the reaction of Big Tech and Western governments to the emergence of China’s DeepSeek confirms the high-stakes nature of technology wars today and in our putatively collective future.

Then there is the massive growth of industries like electric cars, as well as renewable energy sources in general, particularly solar. This translates into a huge demand for batteries, solar panels and other related implements, requiring huge quantities of critical minerals.

It is in this context that Pakistan’s current rulers are hedging its bets on a new wave of resource grabs; whereas until recently our fossil fuel-dominated economy revolved around oil, gas and coal, today it is all about critical minerals. Pakistan has never had huge deposits of oil and gas, but the establishment and its lackeys have always generated rents by playing off Pakistan’s geostrategic location.

This has not changed; the Gulf kingdoms, China and the US continue to grapple for influence within our ruling class. What has changed — or at least this is what the current regime believes — is that Pakistan now has significant enough deposits of critical minerals to be a big economic player in its own right.

But this would require Pakistan to have a strategy to use its minerals to industrialise, rather than just sell them off to the highest bidder. It is also telling that mineral extraction is hardly beneficial for local ecologies, no matter how one pitches the energy transition. But then again, Pakistan’s rulers have never been shy to trade in contradictions — as the ‘Green Pakistan’ corporate farming initiative, which is premised on more canal-building on the Indus river, confirms.

And then of course there is the question of what the critical minerals game will mean for the Baloch and other peoples who have only ever suffered brutalisation due to the geopolitical struggles that have played out on their lands. Beyond Balochistan, the current wave of violence in KP and the increasingly brazen ecocide in the mountainous highlands of GB have a lot to do with the race for critical minerals.

Bounty hunters are at it again. And the people whose rights and resources everyone is after are still proverbial sacrificial lambs.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, April 11th, 2025