Pakistan’s new tango with Trump has rare earths and promises for the holy land
Pakistan’s new strong man, Field Marshall Asim Munir has been on a mission to woo the new US administration. For now his charm offensive has been successful in the US with the Trump administration favoring Pakistan over India. While this will focus more on what has been announced, Trump’s belief that Pakistan can be a source of rare earths and oil, what the US administration has chosen to leave out of the US President’s briefing is how difficult or impossible will this extraction be in areas such are Balochistan, Waziristan and Khyber Pakhtunwa which are hostile for Pakistani forces, where the Chinese have all but given up and due to whose hostility and support the US had to leave Afghanistan. If the US President were to continue along the path he seems to have charted, he will bring the US back to the same neighborhoods that Joe Biden quickly abandoned citing the Doha accords Trump himself had signed.
Separately what is not being explicitly announced is Asim Munir implications that he will be able to join the Abraham accords. Pakistan’s recognition of Israel will be a big feather in Trumps cap and widely welcomed by Bibi Netanyahu. Much like the rare earths, this will be superficial gain for long term suffering. Neither are the people of Pakistan in any position to accept Israel and opposition to Israel runs deep in most of the country. For superficial political grandstanding the US President, who has already lost his relationship with India which took 25 years to develop, Bibi Netanyahu will lose a security and people to people pact with India for his own political survival. Coming back to rare earths and natural resources…
Pakistan’s endless tug-of-war over natural resources is not just about minerals, royalties, or water. It is about whether the country is truly a federation—or merely a centralized state wearing federalism’s mask. Fifteen years after the 18th Amendment promised provincial ownership and control, provinces still watch as their wealth is extracted, revenues siphoned away, and communities left in poverty.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s marble and emeralds vanish to middlemen while workers cough in dusty quarries. Sindh’s farmers lose water to Punjab’s new canals even as their fields dry and Thar coal displaces entire villages. Balochistan, sitting on world-class copper and gold deposits, remains Pakistan’s poorest province, its miners laboring without safety gear while insurgency simmers.
Now, Washington has entered the scene. President Trump has elevated critical minerals to a national-security priority, eyeing Pakistan’s rare earths as a way to reduce US dependence on China. Islamabad, desperate for foreign exchange, is eager to oblige. But the pattern is familiar: deals cut at the center, enforced by the military, and presented to locals as fait accompli.
History shows where this leads. Projects like Reko Diq and Saindak promised billions yet delivered displacement, pollution, and unrest. With US capital and political cover in the mix, the same extractive model will only tighten. The likely outcome is not development but repression—villages fenced off, dissent criminalized, royalties delayed, and the army deployed in the name of “strategic security.” Anti-US anger will grow, because for communities on the ground, American partnership will look like American complicity.
It doesn’t have to end that way. If Washington insists on transparency, district-level benefit-sharing, independent oversight, and free, prior, informed consent, rare-earth partnerships could strengthen Pakistan’s federalism. If not, the United States will be blamed for entrenching the very inequities that fuel unrest.
Pakistan’s provinces are not asking for charity—they are demanding recognition that federalism means more than rhetoric. Unless US policy reflects that, Trump’s rare-earths gamble may yield not minerals, but another layer of instability in a country already stretched to the breaking point.
