An Afghan Taliban drive to stabilize the economy and improve sentiment toward the regime through new mining deals with Chinese and other companies is drawing skepticism.

Faced with international sanctions and a bleak economic outlook, the Taliban administration at the end of last month announced seven contracts worth $6.5 billion for the extraction and processing of gold, iron ore, lead and zinc across several provinces.

Shahabuddin Delawar, the Taliban’s mining and petroleum minister, said the contracts had been awarded to Afghan companies and foreign partners. He did not disclose specifics of the Afghan companies, the scope of the partnerships or implementation timelines.

The contracts show growing interest in Afghanistan’s resources among China and other countries despite serious security risks. China on Wednesday also became the first to send a new ambassador to Kabul since the Taliban takeover, appointing Zhao Xing, although no country has formally recognized the regime and Beijing said the move was part of a regular rotation.

The Taliban’s mining contracts follow other resource deals with China and highlight the regime’s strategy both for shoring up the Afghan economy and cementing its own rule. Since the Taliban returned to power in the vacuum left by withdrawing U.S.-led forces in August 2021, the regime has faced dire economic challenges as Western development aid dried up, but like previous Afghan governments, it hopes to harness the country’s untapped mineral wealth.

The $6.5 billion figure itself is a staggering one for Afghanistan, equivalent to about half the country’s entire gross domestic product. And the Taliban needs foreign involvement if it has any hope of making this work.

“The foreign-collaboration element to the agreements is key because domestically Afghanistan doesn’t have the technological capacity to extract and process these minerals on its own,” said Michael Kugelman, director of the Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute.

In the latest deals, some of the contracts have been allocated to a mixture of Afghan, Iranian, Turkish and British companies, committing over $5 billion to iron mines in Herat province’s Ghorian district.

In addition, the Taliban administration awarded a $310 million contract for a gold mine spanning 12 square kilometers in Takhar province’s Chahab district to a joint Afghan-Chinese venture.

But some experts and former mining officials suspect the $6.5 billion number is inflated and stress it is too early to predict how the projects will turn out.

“The legal-policy framework for the mining sector is not only vague but almost nonexistent,” Tamim Asey, a senior visiting research fellow at King’s College London with experience in Afghanistan’s mining ministry, wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “The regime doesn’t even have a constitution let alone mining legal framework.”

He argued that the Afghan mining ministry lacks the technical and other capacity to manage and oversee such contracts, warning this could lead to a grim outlook of “corruption, mismanagement and environmental disasters.”

Additionally, he noted that Afghanistan’s troubled financial and banking sector presents significant hurdles for financial transactions.

There are also questions about whether the Taliban can provide the security that prospective partners expect, especially China.

“Beijing has shown a willingness to invest in volatile places around the world, but until it has assurances that the Taliban are curbing the presence of militants — an unlikely prospect — China will remain cautious,” Kugelman told Nikkei Asia.

The presence of senior Taliban figures — including Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the deputy prime minister for economic affairs — alongside Chinese investors at the Aug. 31 contract-signing ceremony serves as a signal of the Taliban’s commitment to addressing those concerns. But doing so may be easier said than done.

Beijing expects the Taliban leadership to keep its promise to prevent the Turkistan Islamic Party, a Uyghur militant group, from attacking Chinese interests inside Afghanistan. China refers to the TIP to by its former name, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, and blames it for unrest in its western region of Xinjiang.

Experts point to other worries, too, including the persistent threat of attacks by ISIS-K, the Islamic State group’s regional affiliate; the anti-Taliban National Resistance Front (NRF); and internal conflicts within the Taliban ranks over minerals.

Last December, ISIS-K targeted a Kabul hotel popular with Chinese businesspeople — following a meeting to discuss the security of the Chinese Embassy between Chinese Ambassador Wang Yu and Afghan Deputy Foreign Minister Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai.

The Taliban has its own worries about ISIS-K, in particular, and the risk of collaboration between militant groups weakening the rulers’ grip.

The United Nations Security Council in a July report highlighted links between members of TIP and ISIS-K, which “jointly published propaganda posters” and “participated in ISIS-K operations.”

Last month brought reports of heavy fighting between the Taliban and NRF insurgents in Takhar province — home to the China-linked gold mine — with both sides claiming to have killed members of the other.

Taliban factions in Takhar have at times engaged in violent confrontations over control of valuable resources. Media reports said the Taliban leadership last month replaced ethnic Tajik district governors in Takhar with Kandahari Pashtuns in an effort to end the infighting. The Taliban leadership is now mainly ethnic Pashtun and based in Kandahar, and sending their own is seen as a way to ensure Takhar is in sync with the administration.