The Taliban Has Claimed Afghanistan’s Real Economic Prize

I have a hard time agreeing with the central premise here.

The article states that the Taliban had a protection scheme (possibly legitimate, possibly a racket) going on to effectively tax all trade through their regions and that made them a lot of money. I can believe that.

But calling that the "real economic prize" seems to miss the point. There was so much trade happening because of the tens of billions of US dollars flooding into the nation. If you take away all that money, you are left with a lot less economic activity to tax, and are probably dealing with customers and suppliers who can't afford nearly as much protection money.

If there was a true economic prize, it's the foreign aid coming in which will likely dry up soon. There are no major international shipping routes through Afghanistan (I think! see my note below), so without the foreign money they're left skimming off the top of trade through a poor developing nation, which doesn't seem like much of a prize at all.

However... the article states this : "Even before their blitz into the capital over the weekend, the Taliban had claimed the country’s real economic prize: the trade routes — comprising highways, bridges and footpaths — that serve as strategic choke points for trade across South Asia." I wish they'd elaborated more on this - are there some desirable routes going through Afghanistan that nations in the region might like to use for trade?

I spent time there between 2012-2014.

At the time, Afghan gov’t spending was approx $16 billion with only approx $2 billion actual national revenue.

Which was a well known, but largely ignored, problem to anyone paying attention.

It’s unlikely China’s Belt and Road Initiative will generate similar frictional toll/rent cashflow opportunities in the short-term.

Debt-trap diplomacy tactics are unlikely to work as I reckon the Taliban would strongly prefer to continue collecting tolls/rents on commerce movement rather than borrow foreign money for domestic owned infrastructure.

Why fix what isn’t broke(n)?

I suspect China would need to be willing to lose circa $5-10 billion annually in frictional losses as rent to the Taliban to maximise odds of influence and stability.

Pakistan doesn’t have the financial capacity to guarantee Afghanistan’s success, only it’s continued failure.

India would struggle to rent influence due to a lack of excess financial capacity and geopolitical incongruence.

Iran has its hands full elsewhere and is probably focused more on ensuring Iran’s Shia diplomats aren’t slaughtered again.

In terms of natural resources, I recall the stories of Afghanistan’s half trillion under the dirt.

But it reminds me of the trillion dollar asteroids.

It’s irrelevant is the cost of extraction and bringing it to market exceeds the value of the resource.

I doubt this adds up to more than a billion dollars, which is not a huge amount for a country. The Taliban will still be in trouble and might want to diversify.

What is astounding is that the US spent 2 trillion USD over 20 years or about a 100 billion USD per year. This is 5 times more than the estimated 2020 GDP of Afghanistan and most of it went to the US economy (last year it was just shy of 5 billion USD in aid to Afghanistan, most of it security aid - "paying their salaries" as Biden terms it).

The issue is the Afghan government. It can't be bypassed, as Afghanistan is a sovereign state. There is little incentive to give more in aid, when you know that corruption might be an issue. So endless occupation it is, instead of a Marshall plan.

The tl;dr is they captured trade routes and trade posts that generate a significant amount of money, one example being illegal trading of gas, I guess from Iran to other places, going around an embargo (it didn't specify exactly what was illegal). This would be 100s of millions a year in total.

The real prize was not gas or minerals, but all the enemies they made along the way.

The link doesn't load for me. It appears to be some kind of archive website - what was the original link?