India, Nov. 15 -- While Western consumers and governments celebrate electric vehicles, wind turbines, and new tech, the local population in Pakistan's Pashtun belt is paying the price with their lives, health, and fundamental human rights. Why is the international community silent?

When we in the West discuss climate change, the green transition, and the next generation of smartphones, we rarely talk about where the raw materials come from. We talk even less about the human cost of extracting them. But in the mountainous Pashtun border regions of Pakistan, a humanitarian and environmental catastrophe is unfolding in plain sight, and the world is deafeningly silent.

The Pakistani military regime has turned its gaze toward the mineral-ric...