Critical minerals big part of US-Pakistan partnership

We have to remember what it was that first put the US-Pakistan relationship on a better path than it had been in the years since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

I think we can trace that moment to the speech that President Trump gave before Congress during his second term in March, just a few months after he took office for the second time. He thanked Pakistan for helping US forces apprehend a terrorist from Islamic State Khorasan who, according to the US, had been involved in the terrorist attack outside the Kabul airport in 2021 during the US withdrawal.

I think we actually saw right away that it was not what Pakistan was doing as a war mediator, or what it was doing in terms of security provision in the Middle East, or anything like that. It was actually a counterterrorism issue. This is what I would argue set the path for a better or warmer relationship between the US and Pakistan.

That said, the fact that many of Pakistan’s closest partners and allies are in the Middle East is significant at a moment when the Middle East has become a critical strategic region for the United States.

There were efforts made on the part of US governments to pivot away from the Middle East to Asia and the Indo-Pacific. But given events of the last few years in the Middle East, with the war in Gaza and then more recently the war in Iran, the US focus has returned to the Middle East.

Pakistan, because of its close partnerships with most of the GCC states as well as its close relationships with other key players in the Middle East, including Turkiye and Egypt, has made very clear to the United States how strategic a player Pakistan is in the Middle East.

Then, of course, the fact that Pakistan has had in recent years good ties with Iran contributed to a situation where Pakistan has become the prime mediator in the Iran war.

The big question moving forward is, assuming the war eventually ends, which it will hopefully sooner rather than later, and assuming some semblance of stability returns to the Middle East, will the Trump administration continue to view Pakistan as a country with significant strategic utility in the Middle East even after things have calmed down and the Trump administration’s attention may shift elsewhere again?

Pakistan has become a significant global diplomatic actor.

Michael Kugelman

For now, it is very simple. It is the fact that Pakistan has such significant equities and a wide range of partners in the Middle East. Its diplomatic alignments there really bolster its cause as a strategic player as seen in Washington.

One of the challenges for US-Pakistan partnership is that there really is not much continuity. It seems like it is up and down. One of the cliches of the relationship is that it has been a roller coaster, just a lot of ups and downs, which is true.

I think there is a good chance that whoever is the next US president, there will be less US focus on Pakistan, just because so much of why the US-Pakistan relationship has had this renaissance since Trump came back to power is Trump himself.

He has made very clear his affinities and his admiration for Pakistan’s top leaders. He has done that many times. It is Trump who has really set this agenda of commercial diplomacy. It is Trump who views Pakistan as a country that has much to offer in terms of critical minerals and so on.

In that sense, the bilateral relationship has really been personalized because of the president himself. If you are looking for a sustained partnership between the US and Pakistan, and I very much hope that we will see that outcome, I think the nature of the relationship might need to change a bit.

If you have Trump allies that succeed him as president, they may to some degree have the same sentiments toward Pakistan that he did, but not as strongly. And if the other party takes over the presidency, I just do not think that you are going to see much interest on a strategic level in Pakistan.

On the issue of counterterrorism, yes, if there is a view that the Afghanistan-Pakistan region could once again become an area that provides space for terrorists that pose a threat to the United States, then I think that you would see some efforts on the part of the next president to focus on counterterrorism.

Another issue is geopolitics, US-China competition. We saw to some extent in the Biden administration, as US-China competition was sharpening, the embrace of the Indo-Pacific strategy and strategies like it. This was about strengthening ties with countries across the Indo-Pacific, including Pakistan, in order to undercut China to a degree or try to pursue relations with countries in the region that are robust enough that these countries are not wholly reliant on China for economic support.

I do think that there is some element of geopolitics to the Trump administration’s focus on critical minerals in Pakistan. It does not want China to be really dominating that space of outside players tapping into that resource.

So if US-China competition intensifies in the next US presidential administration, then I do think that there will be a view that it is important to work with Pakistan to find areas of partnership and cooperation so that Washington can push back against China.

Critical minerals is a big part of the US-Pakistan partnership now. Certainly over the next year or so, and perhaps over the duration of this Trump administration, that will be a big pillar for partnership.

Commercial diplomacy is really the mantra of US policy in Pakistan. This is the term that US policymakers and diplomats use. What is commercial diplomacy? It is about engaging with other countries to tap into commercial opportunities, in particular, in the case of Pakistan, critical minerals.

The US government is working very closely with American companies to try to facilitate opportunities to access critical minerals in Pakistan. There have been a few agreements and MOUs signed between American companies and Pakistan focused on critical minerals.

I myself am a bit skeptical. So much of what we have been told about critical minerals in Pakistan and their location, most of them are located in areas that are not exactly stable, particularly Balochistan as well as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Certainly there are going to be security risks for investors that want to go in there, particularly because these violent actors, these terrorist organizations like BLA that are active in Balochistan, have as one of their main issues their view that external forces are exploiting local resources, including and especially local resources and potentially critical minerals.

There are a lot of risks there.

I would argue that to ensure a sustained substantive partnership between the US and Pakistan, the two countries will need to look for other areas of focus. Certainly counterterrorism could be one of them, but I think trade and investment more broadly could evolve into something significant.

We know that Pakistan has not been penalized by tariffs as much as some of its neighbors have, especially India. There could be opportunities for other types of collaborations.

I have argued that the US and Pakistan could find ways to partner more in third countries and other regions, including the Middle East.

There are potential directions that the relationship could go in, and hopefully it will. I think it would ultimately be a healthier outcome for the relationship if they look to areas beyond critical minerals as anchors for partnership.

One of the challenges for US-Pakistan partnership is that there really is not much continuity. We have seen that.

Many had argued that there would be continuity, that once Trump came back to power, he would continue with the policy of the Biden administration, which was really to not do much at all with Pakistan. But things surprisingly went in another direction.

If we look back at the post-9/11 period, I would say that there was continuity between George W. Bush and Barack Obama. There was a tendency to look at Pakistan through the lens of Afghanistan, which I do not think was good.

It is never a good thing for a bilateral partnership if you are looking at the other country through the lens of a third country. But both Bush and Obama administrations did that. Other US administrations have looked at Pakistan through the lens of third countries, certainly Afghanistan in the past, as well as the Soviet Union and China.

We can expect there to be another turn in the relationship when the next US president comes to power, again because of different objectives from the next US leader.

The direction the relationship takes will depend on a number of things. It will depend on which party takes over the White House, the extent of US-China competition, along with the extent of US concerns about terrorism risks in the region.

These will all be things that determine how much continuity there is with what we have seen and whether there is a pretty significant shift.

But I expect there to be some changes in the relationship. I do not think that the relationship will collapse, or that it will just fade away in the eyes of Washington. But I am not sure if there will be as much of a sharp strategic focus on the country as there is now.

Pakistan has been fortunate in that there has been a perfect storm in a positive way. The combination of the critical mineral opportunities it offers to an administration that is exceptionally interested in such things, whereas past US presidents were not, coupled with continued, even if limited to a degree, terrorism concerns on the part of this administration, as well as the fact that the Middle East has come back into prominence as a strategic place for the US.

This has all benefited Pakistan. It has all benefited the US-Pakistan relationship.

But we do not know if those factors will all be in place several years from now when we have a new president.

We also have to be candid and humble in terms of what Pakistan can do. There has been a lot of talk about how Pakistan has become a significant global diplomatic actor because of its Iran mediation, because of its increasing influence in the Middle East, which we have seen developing in recent years, and of course culminating with the Makkah Agreement.

But because Pakistan, at the end of the day, does not have as much to offer economically to the world as other middle powers, it is difficult for a country to become a significant global player over the longer term if it cannot offer something economically, if it cannot offer a particularly powerful export that is in high demand.

Whether you are talking about energy oil, tech, or rare earths, Pakistan cannot really offer these. We know that its export mix has been relatively not very diverse. Its focus is around textiles and so on.

That is good. But Pakistan has plenty of neighbors that export textiles that have been much more globally competitive, including India, Bangladesh, Vietnam and others. China, of course, has been a big actor in that as well.

I do see a tech sector developing in Pakistan. I think that it tends to be dwarfed and overshadowed by India’s, which is obviously so much larger and more of a presence internationally.

But I do think this is something for Pakistan to look at. I would argue, though, that you are going to need to see different types of policies and legislation that could better enable tech to grow in Pakistan.

Here you get into issues about regulation and things like that.

Tech is certainly something. We know that Pakistan trades a number of goods, foodstuffs, clothing and textiles. But we are thinking about a 21st-century economy, and so much of that revolves around tech, innovation and things like that.

That is where I do think Pakistan does have something to offer. But I think that one needs to think of this as a long game for Pakistan, looking to the next five, 10, 15 years, where it might be able to, if it makes the right changes in terms of policy and so on, offer something to the United States, the region and the world economically.

That’s the best I could offer now.