In the emerging global order, control of critical minerals increasingly defines technological leadership, industrial power and geopolitical influence.
Currently, China remains central to global critical mineral supply chains, driven primarily by its overwhelming dominance in processing and refining.
The growing centrality of these minerals has intensified supply chain anxieties, pushing US policymakers to recalibrate strategic dependencies.
Under Trump, securing access to rare earth minerals has become a national security priority.
Beyond China, existing suppliers such as Australia, Canada, Brazil, Vietnam and several African states remain constrained by cost, infrastructure, regulatory complexities, and timelines.
Whereas, Pakistan offers a cost-effective and comparatively flexible opportunity, supported by the world’s second-largest coal reserves and seventh-largest copper reserves, with an estimated value of about $6.1 trillion.
The US has shown a clear interest in the extraction of minerals in Balochistan.
US EXIM Bank is investing $1.25 billion in Pakistan’s minerals sector. Pakistan, on its part, is keen to attract FDI to help revive its struggling economy.
China is already interested in Pakistan’s mineral sector; however, it is not structurally dependent on Pakistan’s minerals, given its own reserves and dominance in global processing.
Pakistan’s critical minerals, therefore, hold greater relevance for the US. China’s economic presence in Pakistan is already matured and institutionalised and therefore not contingent on prospective mineral access.
While the US seeks to explore and extract natural resources in the south-western regions of Pakistan, India is playing its own dangerous games in the same region.
By stocking, supporting and sustaining a so-called separatist movement, India seeks to weaken its archrival, Pakistan.
Instability in Balochistan serves a dual purpose for India: while it bleeds Pakistan constantly on one hand, it undermines Chinese interests by threatening investments and access to Gwadar port on the other.
Gwadar is widely regarded as a crown jewel of China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative. Its location provides direct access to the Arabian Sea and shortens important trade and energy routes.
As a deep-sea port with expanding commercial relevance, Gwadar holds major economic and strategic significance.
Its growing prominence is reshaping regional trade routes and security dynamics in the Arabian Sea, posing a strategic challenge to India’s traditional influence in the region.
India’s strategic anxieties vis-à-vis China and its longstanding rivalry with Pakistan add to the regional security environment.
India seeks to constrain China’s expanding economic and strategic footprint inside Pakistan through overt and covert means.
Indian intelligence networks exploit porous border regions, particularly areas adjoining Iran’s Balochistan, to facilitate infiltration and destabilisation activities.
Groups such as the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), which has also been designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO) by the US, remain central to Pakistan’s security narrative.
Another central security challenge for Pakistan remains the presence of TTP in Afghanistan. TTP’s use of Afghan soil against Pakistan has created friction in bilateral security cooperation to benefit India.
Pakistan-Afghanistan strained ties serve multiple purposes for India, including limiting Pakistan’s influence in Afghanistan and containing China’s development in Pakistan.
Presence and operational freedom of TTP elements intensify Pakistan’s security pressures, particularly along the western border and in Balochistan.
These dynamics sustain instability, weaken security conditions, and disrupt economic and development activity in sensitive regions.
The Central Asian Republics (CARs), attempting to reduce dependence on Russia, require stable transit routes through Afghanistan to reach Pakistani ports and global markets, a development aligned with long-term US strategic goals in Eurasia.
However, the continued presence of international terrorist organisations and cross-border terrorism spillover from Afghanistan into Central Asia and Pakistan directly undermines these objectives.
Terrorist networks operating from Afghan territory destabilise CAR states, disrupt connectivity corridors and weaken regional economic diversification efforts.
This erosion of security space harms core US interests in counterterrorism, regional stability, energy diversification and limiting rival influence.
If Afghanistan remains a permissive environment for terrorist activity, US efforts to integrate and stabilise Central Asia will face structural setbacks.
Preventing Afghanistan from functioning as a hub for terrorism is therefore central to safeguarding US strategic interests in the region.
In this geopolitical chessboard, US interests will also be undermined by the persistence of proxy-driven instability.
Disruptions in Pakistan’s mineral-rich regions carry direct implications for US strategic interests and long-term supply-chain security.
Allowing regional rivalries andthe Indo-Taliban destabilising nexus to complicate engagement with Pakistan’s critical minerals would run against Washington’s strategic objectives.
Stability in Balochistan and along Pakistan’s western frontier, therefore, holds broader economic and strategic significance.
The policy question is unavoidable: will the US allow Indo-Taliban dynamics to obstruct or stigmatise its potential access to Pakistan’s critical mineral resources?
