“China will be moving in. There are rare earth minerals in [Afghanistan]. I don’t know why we didn’t work with the Afghans to develop that, but we never did,” McCaul said on Tuesday. “And now, you’re going to have China going in mining these rare earth minerals."
McCaul said that as a result, China is the winner and the United States the loser in this situation as are the Afghan people.
"[T]he Taliban* will have a huge windfall profit from this that they’ll put into terrorist financing,” he added.
In 2017, former US President Donald Trump met with then-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani agreed there were opportunities for US companies to rapidly develop Afghanistan’s rare-earth minerals as a way to offset the costs of the war there.
However, a report written by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction in August of 2018 said those ambitions failed to materialize as the US "extractive sector programming" stayed relatively minimal.
After a weeks-long offensive upon large cities, launched after the start of foreign troop withdrawal, the Taliban took over Afghanistan and its capital on Sunday, prompting President Ashraf Ghani to resign and flee. The militants declared the two-decade war to be over.
*A terrorist organization banned in Russia