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.
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