Afghanistan’s mineral wealth

The Pentagon announced this week the discovery of mineral deposits in Afghanistan worth $1 trillion or more, enough to fundamentally alter the country’s fractured economy. The deposits include large reserves of lithium, a key component of high-tech batteries, as well as copper, iron, cobalt, and gold. In fact, U.S. officials said, the huge veins of minerals are so large that Afghanistan could be transformed into one of the largest mining centers in the world. “There is stunning potential here,” said Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in the region. “There are a lot of ifs, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”

But the findings—which were announced amid growing doubts about the progress of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan—were greeted with skepticism. Extracting the mineral wealth from Afghanistan’s rugged, remote, and largely roadless terrain would be enormously difficult, said Luke Popovich of the National Mining Association. “Sudan will host the Winter Olympics before these guys get a trillion dollars out of the ground,” he said.

The timing of the minerals “discovery” sure looks suspicious, said Marc Ambinder in TheAtlantic.com. For one thing, it’s not news—the Soviets found deposits in the 1980s, and U.S. and Afghan officials discussed exploiting the country’s mineral wealth as far back as 2006. This week’s announcement suggests “a broad and deliberate information operation designed to influence public opinion on the course of the war.”

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As the citizens of Mideast oil states like Iran and Saudi Arabia can attest, mineral wealth is usually more a curse than a blessing, said Donald Marron in The Christian Science Monitor. “Dependency on natural resources can poison a country’s economic and political system,” as government officials siphon much of the wealth into their own pockets and starve other areas of the economy of investment. Still, said Ron Moreau in Newsweek.com, the prospect of $1 trillion worth of minerals raises the stakes in the war. “Thoughts of getting rich might just inspire the Kabul government and its army and police to fight a little harder,” and you can be sure the Taliban would like to get its hands on all that wealth, too.