“Green Energy” Will Be Powered by Taliban Lithium
Save the planet, fund Islamic terrorism.
By Daniel Greenfield
One of the sales pitches for electric cars and assorted green energy projects was that we’d at least be able to unplug from Middle Eastern oil. But instead, we’ve become dependent on the Saudis anyway (the Saudis own 5% of Tesla) and, more crucially on China which sells us the junk solar panels and the rare earth metals (obtained through incredibly dirty mining processes that have devastated lakes and poisoned entire villages) to power the ‘clean’ revolution of ‘green energy’.
Now, topping all that, since the United States failed to develop the lithium mines in Afghanistan and since Biden refuses to mine any at home, the Taliban and Communist China will profit from every garbage electric car that the lefties force down our throats in the name of their hoax environmental crisis.
Save the planet, fund Islamic terrorism.
In a 2010 memo, the Pentagon’s Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, which examined Afghanistan’s development potential, dubbed the country the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.” A year later, the U.S. Geological Survey published a map showing the location of major deposits and highlighted the magnitude of the underground wealth, saying Afghanistan “could be considered as the world’s recognized future principal source of lithium.”
“In an alternate universe, our projects could’ve been generating meaningful employment and tax revenue within years that would provide an economic base and empower the Afghan people to govern themselves,” said Paul A. Brinkley, the former U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense who oversaw the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations until he left in 2011 and the office disbanded.
Instead, Brinkley said, “we’ll have Chinese companies mining lithium to feed a supply chain that will ultimately sell it back to the West, all in a world where there’s simply not enough lithium.”
“Afghanistan lacks an industrial base, [but] they have great mineral resources, and no Westerners can compete with the Chinese when it comes to building infrastructure and tolerating hardship,” said Zhou Bo, a retired People’s Liberation Army senior colonel who is now an international security expert at Tsinghua University.
In a rare interview, Shahabuddin Delawar, Afghanistan’s minister of mines and a senior Taliban leader, told Washington Post journalists that just 24 hours earlier, representatives of a Chinese company had been in his office presenting the details of a $10 billion bid that included pledges to build a lithium ore processing plant and battery factories in Afghanistan, upgrade long-neglected mountain roads and create tens of thousands of local jobs.
A commission of senior Taliban officials led by Abdul Ghani Baradar, the deputy prime minister for economic affairs, “will weigh whatever good proposals we receive,” adding that the government would welcome Western and even U.S. bidders if sanctions were dropped. U.S. sanctions currently prohibit all transactions with the Taliban, with exceptions for humanitarian aid.
“We always said if the United States takes its soldiers and killing machines out of Afghanistan, it too could invest here,” he said. “The demand for oil is decreasing, but the demand for lithium is only going up. We have 2.5 million tons in Nurestan alone. Extract it, and Afghanistan can be one of the richest countries in the world.”
By 2030, when about 60 percent of all cars in China, Europe and the United States will be electric, the world is expected to face a lithium shortfall, said Henry Sanderson, executive editor of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and the author of “Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green.”
“China’s lithium sector is in a really enviable position: They dominate the processing, they’ve got the battery materials and factories, but that whole supply chain goes defunct if you don’t have raw material to feed the industrial machine,” Sanderson said. “That’s why they’re going to Afghanistan. They need to secure as much as they can.”
I could count how many ways Biden has screwed us in Afghanistan, but I’d run out of time.
I’ll just note that Al Qaeda is actually in charge of Nurestan.
The Taliban have appointed Al Qaeda leaders to key positions including as governors of entire provinces. Nuristan, where 53 American soldiers held off hundreds of Jihadis during the assault on Combat Outpost Keating, resulting in the awarding of two Medals of Honor and nine Silver Stars for the second deadliest battle of the war, is now under Al Qaeda governance.
Those electric cars that Biden wants to force on all of us, by banning actual cars, every one you buy will fund Al Qaeda.