In April, a convention hall in Islamabad that was supposed to fill with mining executives was packed instead with the world’s press, covering peace talks that Pakistan had brokered. The Pakistan Minerals Investment Forum (PMIF) had been booked into the Jinnah Convention Centre for April 8 and 9. Three days after the postponed event would have closed, US and Iranian delegations arrived in the capital for the first direct talks between the two countries in decades, and the convention centre became the media hub.
On November 12, the miners get the hall back. But they are returning to a different world. In February, I wrote that conferences do not determine whether mining projects succeed. The question was not whether Pakistan’s deposits exist, but whether its institutions could deliver them. Ten days after that piece ran, the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran, and Iran moved to close the Strait of Hormuz. By mid-March, the forum had been postponed. By early April, Barrick had slowed development at Reko Diq.
The institutional question still stands. Almost everything around that question has moved. In June, closing out the Ground View Kazakhstan series, I compared reporting on frontier mining jurisdictions from a distance to putting together a jigsaw puzzle without seeing the full picture on the box.