6.5 Grendel CAD - FEA

[LRRPF52]

China is basically buying up all of the copper mines worldwide. Afghanistan has the second largest copper deposits in the world. China is ready to take that over once we are out of there.

China has already begun extraction of minerals, oil, natural gas, and lithium in Afghanistan, while the saps from NATO/ISAF ensure the main Afghan ring road is kept open. They were pulling the strings all along, to include the use of dozens of surrogate jihadi groups like Al Qaeda based out of Pakistan to trigger Western knee-jerk responses into the region.

China can't get enough minerals, energy, cement, or food, as they have a population with the following trend:



They are at 1.347 billion people now, with only external solutions for relieving the pressure caused by excess population, which means they need mostly America's real estate more than anything, as it's the only arable farmland and resource-rich land with the infrastructure to take goods to the seas readily. Sucking us into dead-end foreign wars has been extremely beneficial for China & Russia over the past 12 years, especially as you look at the sacrifice of force posture in the Pacific Rim and Europe, where the US has drawn on for units to deploy to Central Asia and the Middle East (two areas that you really don't want to deploy conventional forces).

It actually benefits China the longer foreign forces stay in Afghanistan, pulling security for them, as they are then able to focus on mineral and resource extraction, while keeping the shenanigans up with surrogate drug & arms-smuggling warlords based out of Pakistan and Iran, who have their own competition for Afghanistan based largely on Shia-Sunni rivalry, compounded by no less than a dozen varying terrorist groups with state-sponsorship.

It takes about 5 years of study just to become familiar with the various factions out of Pakistan alone, as you will have no clue of what is remotely going on there without a good understanding of who the actors are, what their interests are, and how global powers use these factions to press their interests.

Pakistan jumps to the tune of China, as China is the most significant supplier of arms to them when you accept that China gave them their nukes, to use Pakistan as a surrogate flanking piece against China's main arch-rival: India. Since Pakistan is an illegitimate separate state broken off from India politically, given full legitimacy in the UN by China's demand, it all starts to make sense.

The last generation of UK foreign policy/intel/military types had a much better understanding of this backdrop, having been thoroughly invested in the sub-continent before Indian independence, the Paki fragmentation, and so forth. You would think that the UK wouldn't want to touch Afghanistan again after the 1st, 2nd, & 3rd Anglo-Afghan Wars of 1839–1842, 1878–1880, and 1919. You would also think that the US would never make the mistake of committing conventional forces to the land-locked dead-end of military conquest, since "we" used it to suck the Soviets into, leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union after their 10-year waste of resources from 1979-1989.

The short story is that all metals, including brass and copper, will only be more and more in demand as Chinese and Indians transition from trash shacks and mud-floor huts to quasi-European-type pigeon-hole cracker box apartment units constructed of cement, with rebar, plumbing, electrical, etc.