I understand Afg has a lot of lithium reserves as well as opium poppies.
Trillions in rare Earth minerals.
A ton of smack too.
Unfortunately, anybody trying to mine the lithium would have to deal with the various tribes and warlords.
The ONLY people who have successfully ruled for a while were the Mongols, and they did it by being totally ruthless. When a region rebelled, the mongols killed all the males, and enslaved and sold all the females. That made things settle down for a while.
The Chinese might be able to make a go of it, but only by going in with a million-man army and killing everyone, and then salting all the supply paths from out of Pakistan with radioactive cobalt.