Afghanistan’s Extractives Industry: U.S. Programs Did Not Achieve Their Goals and Afghanistan Did No

The ETA program consisted of five components, each with its own goals: • Component I: The goal of Component I was to build the technical capacity of MOMP and AGS to analyze, assess, store data on Afghanistan’s mineral deposits, and to publish that data under the authority of the MOMP and AGS. [...] Further, when asked whether the Afghan government had the capacity to sustain achievements realized by ETA, USGS reported that the Afghan government was not self-sufficient.45 After accounting for the cessation of ETA programming after the collapse of the Afghan government, we analyzed the quarterly reports that USAID and USGS provided and determined that the goals of only one of the five ETA comp. [...] The MELRA Program Did Not Meet All of Its Goals MELRA’s extractives sector goal was to “improve the MOMP’s contract administration capacity of the MOMP.” The program sought to achieve this by “collaborating with the MOMP to develop a durable and predictable contracting framework for mining licenses” through the adoption of the regulations, procedures, and transactional documents necessary to reali. [...] For example, according to USAID and CLDP, the agencies provided comments to MOMP on drafts of the 2018 Minerals Law, the 2019 Mining Regulations, the Model Concession Agreement, the 2020 draft Hydrocarbons Regulation, and MOMP’s Mining Industry Roadmap.65 However, a June 2020 memorandum from USAID to the Administrative Office of the President of Afghanistan stated that the MOMP faced numerous obst. [...] 66 USAID, memorandum to the Administrative Office of the President of Afghanistan on the role of the MOMP and the management of Afghanistan’s mineral resources, June 5, 2020.