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Afghan Tech Minerals — Cure, Curse, Or Hype?
Gooseygoose writes "The Pentagon revealed recently that Afghanistan has as much as $1 trillion in mineral wealth, a potential game changer in the ongoing conflict there. Many news outlets have picked up this story, some simply repeating the official talking points, while others raise serious concerns. Is this 'discovery' just hype, or will it truly alter the landscape of the Afghan war? Perhaps more importantly, can this mineral wealth (whether real or illusory) pave the way to a peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan, or is it more likely to drive geopolitical feedback loops that plunge the region further into turmoil?"
Relatedly, Marc Ambinder wrote a few days ago in the Atlantic that the US had knowledge of vast mineral deposits in Afghanistan several years ago, giving the recent announcement the appearance of a PR campaign.
It is all three.
go back to the Soviet occupation days.
proving once again that some governments are simply so corrupt they can't sell anything because the bribes are too complex to figure out, even with computers.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
El Reg just thinks it is a complete PR exercise.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/18/afghanistan_mineral_report/
Extracting the wealth is neither simple or sensible.
wot no sig
Again - no idea whether this is true or just hype, but thought it was worth mentioning.
It's not clear what the US goal is in Afghanistan, and how to get there. But the possibility of mineral wealth can be a useful fact in affecting the calculus of other countries in how they deal with the conflict. The possibility of lots of lithium can be very important to the Chinese, and having their backing in making Afghanistan stable would be very welcome. It's going to be a corrupt hellhole no matter what the US does, but if enough other countries want it to be a stable, mineral-producing, corrupt hellhole then maybe it will be.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
Poor religious nutballs will just become rich religious nutballs. And if anyone thinks that the Afghan mainstream aren't a bunch of religious nutballs, go rent a documentary called Afghan Star (about the Afghan equivalent of "American Idol") and watch what happens when a female contestant dares to dance on stage.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Yes, it was clearly stated that some of the information used to research these deposits was found in Russian documents left over from the occupation.
So since these documents were discovered (in country) several years ago, clearly they knew about it several years ago.
But So what? The Russians knew about it even LONGER ago, but some how this is ignored when raising the question of whether the deposits are "real or illusory".
It takes time to follow someone else's notes, written in Russian, get core samples (in a war zone). On what date should the announcement have been made?
The Russians knew, and hid it from the Afgans. The US/Nato surveyed the deposits and published it.
Somehow US/Nato gets scapegoated and the Russians are forgotten.
What's up with that?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I've always thought what der Führer Shrub advocated was to chop off the left wing... hand so that right hand is accountable to no one and need not share anything with anyone.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
What are THOSE AFGHANS doing sitting on OUR MINERALS?
That much is true. However accounting requires discovery, then investigation.
If the US government had announced three years ago a large estimate of mineral wealth based on the fact that some soldiers noticed a lot of ore lying around, would we be saying "at least they are not trying to make a big deal out of 3 year old news!"?
My impression is politically, POTUS would rather be saying "so Afghanistan, you got the check? I'm outta here" as opposed to "great another set of targets to defend!".
What a ridiculous story.
Nobody is going to invest the needed billions of dollars in a country with no real government, no laws, no protection for private property, and every expectation of being taken over by the Taliban as soon as the US army leaves.
It would take billions in up-front investment, as Afghanistan does not have any of the needed things: water, power, roads, engineers, chemical plants, railroads, ports, diging machines, huge trucks, smelters, coal, oil, and gas. Billions, and at least ten years to build the infrastructure before a pound of ore comes out of there.
And minerals only get extracted if the cost is less there than from the developed sources. That's unlikely, due to the needed up-front investment. And one of the alleged largest supplies, Lithium, is already being mined very, very cheaply in South America, where there are huge easily-accessed deposits.
That was the announcement in 1974 courtesy of the Pentagon. Need we explore this further?
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
I am from Venezuela, and our experience with oil is that it's more of a bane. Rich countries rarely arise where there are valuable mineral resources. These merely become corrupt underdevelopped monoproducing big mines controlled by an economical and political elite or neo-communist populist totalitarian ruler.
But it looks like they finally found Whopping Mineral Deposits in Afghanistan.
Time to go after those WMDs, folks.
M$ tactics deployed by DOD
If you stop to think about it what purpose does the Iraq and Afghanistan wars serve the US? It is not about "Democratization" as some have said as both countries have been allowed to reform under demagogues. Iraq could have been about oil but the PRC has most of the contracts. It could be about Billions to be made by insider contractions "servicing" the war.
"The Taliban were legitimate bad guys"
These are the same "Taliban" that the US funded for decades and for whom they provided training and other non-munition resources. The history of the US is one of hypocrisy and so many double standards that I wonder if you are on no one elses side other than your own perverted sense of morality and ethics.
Todd: I hope it proves as delicious as the farmers that grew them
How about turning back the clock to 1978 and stopping Afghanistan from winding up in the middle of the US/Soviet pissing contest? Don't get me wrong, I fully think the Soviets are to blame for spoiling a hundred years of hard work by the Afghanis. But, it's all too easy to wonder what the world would have been like if the "communist threat" could have stayed inside Russia's borders, through decisive action instead of slow, "cold" influences on the region. Heck, in hindsight they may have been better off just becoming a part of the Soviet Union; we see a lot less terrorism and unrest out of the former Soviet states than this one that "won" against them. It's hard to argue that Afghanistan of today is in any better shape than the Soviet Union was at any point in it's past; if they had started rebuilding in 1991 instead of 20?? who knows how close they could be to a functioning country again.
For a look into what Afghanistan was like (and in all likelihood would still be like without direct foreign intervention) see this story: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127914602
Why bother spending all that money on infratstructure to extract those resources when you can just continue to profit from poppies and opiate production? God knows there will never cease to be a demand for that.
...it still doesn't mean diddly to the average Afghan. They just have to look at Africa to know that none of them will see any benefit from this. To the average Joe on the street, all this means is that the local street thugs who make their lives miserable will have better weapons.
1T isn't that much money to a nation. People talk like it is going to make Afganistan rich. Lets put it in prospective: Canada ~34M people 1.3T per annum GDP. Afganistan 28M people. So all the mineral wealth of Afganistan would enable roughly the per capita GDP of Canada for one year. But of course it will take a couple generations to mine all those resources. This only takes them from poor to slightly less poor.
The U.S.'s mistake doesn't excuse what the Taliban did, or change the fact that they were legitimate bad guys--of epic proportion.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The Taliban has only existed since 1994, so that gives them at most 7 years of funding opportunity before they ran afoul of the US. Even so, I can only remember some anti-drug money going to the Taliban.
Ok, so you respond, we armed and funded the mujahedin, part of which eventually formed the Taliban. This is not what you stated in this post, though. Glad to know you never made a decision that went against your initial hopes, though.
These are the same "Taliban" that the US funded for decades and for whom they provided training and other non-munition resources.
Yes, and that was a mistake. It was a worse mistake than that -- we gave them training in weapons and explosives as well. Much of the know-how in Taliban IEDs traces its source to the CIA. That said, the fact that we made mistakes in the 1980s does not preclude us from ever acting in Afghanistan again. If anything, it increases our duty to eliminate the monsters we created.
It is beyond question that American foreign policy over the past 50 years has been a mixed bag. To my mind, that truth does not help one whit in making policy for today. The consequences of those mistakes are real and we need to make policy based on what will lead to the best outcome given the facts as they are now, not how the facts may have been if we had done things differently (even if, as I've said numerous times here, we absolutely should have done things differently).
The history of the US is one of hypocrisy and so many double standards that I wonder if you are on no one elses side other than your own perverted sense of morality and ethics.
Like every other country, we bungle incompetently from time to time. Our imperfection is not the same as perverted morality -- had we foreseen in the 1980s what would come of supporting Bin Laden and the Taliban, we would have declined to get involved.
The intersection of morality and the fog of war -- the inability to reliably predict the likely outcomes of any particular act or strategy -- is a complex one. In retrospect, the War in Vietnam was profoundly immoral both in conception and execution (and the vast majority of moderate America concurs in that sentiment). Placing yourself, however, behind JFK's (that neoconservative monster!) desk and restricting yourself to the facts that he knew at the time, however, and the calculus changes.
It continues to amaze me how naive people are about how the world works, so I'm going to go ahead and break it down. This is a summary of what happens to resources in third world countries:
Because they do not possess the resources, infrastructure, or expertise to mine these minerals, they will have to contract a foreign (probably US) company to do so. To finance the operation, Afghanistan will have to take out a loan from the IMF/World Bank. The corporation(s) doing the mining will reap most of the profits, with a small percentage going to key figures in the Afghan government. The only jobs this will create for the Afghan citizens is menial labor, doing the actual mining. The resources, when gone, will only have benefited the mining/engineering firm(s) involved and the people in power in Afghanistan. Afghanistan will never be able to pay off its loan to the IMF, driving it deeper into poverty, which will, in turn, drive even more locals into the opium trade.
that getting these alleged minerals out of Afghanistan is going to be a problem for western countries. Afghanistan is bordered by Iran to the west, Pakistan to the south and various other 'stans to the north.
Oddly enough, the country that might mostly benefit from this discovery is China and perhaps India. You know China must be interested.
Ah, people either do not study history or are incapable of thinking. Just remember the history of the British East India Company.
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"How Much Is $1 Trillion in Afghanistan?
Source: CEPR.net / Dean Baker's 'Beat the Press' blog
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/how-much-is-1-trillion-in-afghanistan/
"The media have been highlighting projections produced by the military that show that Afghanistan may have $1 trillion of mineral wealth. It would be helpful to put this figure in some context. The NYT helpfully described this sum as being equal to $38,482.76 for every person in Afghanistan."
"It would be useful to note that this is a gross number, it does not subtract the cost of extracting the minerals nor does it consider that these resources would likely be extracted over many decades. If we assume that the cost of extracting the minerals (e.g. foreign produced equipment, foreign trained technicians, profits of foreignh companies and environmental damage -- not counting domestic Afghan labor) is between 25 and 50 percent of the value of the minerals, then the money going to Afghanis would be between $500 billion and $750 billion."
"If this money is earned over a 40-year period (Saudi Arabia has been producing oil for 80 years), then it comes to between $12.5 billion and $18.8 billion a year. Afghanistan's population is currently 29.1 million, but it is growing at the rate of 2.5 percent annually. Assuming the growth rate slows, Afghanistan's population will average about 40 million over this period. This means that the revenue from the minerals will average between $312.50 and $470 per person per year. This is still likely to have a substantial impact on Afghanistan's economy, since its current GDP per capita is just $800 on a purchasing power parity basis."
Much of this is not new. I beleive that the British figured most of this out in the 1930s or earlier. I found information about iron and coal deposits in Afghanistan at the beginning of the war. I don't remember seeing anything about lithium though, but it was 10 years ago when I did that research.
... or both.
The U.S. Army has had this information for a couple of years. It would be nice to know what the objective is of this release. I suspect that this is either part of a psy op to put it in the minds of the tribal leaders that they can be Saudi rich if they just cooperate and behave for a few years or this is psy op for U.S. consumption to make it clear that Afghanistan is not a lost cause
Afghanistan is not resource poor -- it is just extremely mismanaged.
Don't get me wrong, I fully think the Soviets are to blame for spoiling a hundred years of hard work by the Afghanis.
The USSR was fighting radical Islamic extremism. The more secular Marxist government of Afghanistan requested Soviet help to fend off attacks by radical Muslims. This has been further advanced by the declassification of many internal Soviet era documents.
The CIA, with several hundred billion dollars of US Taxpayer and Saudi money, radicalized the "freedom fighters" -- now called "insurgents" -- and armed a good number of jihadists from around the globe. Internally this was described as "giving the Soviet Union their own Vietnam."
As soon as the last Russian soldier left, so did we. The radical muslims who were left fought over the scraps, and eventually the Taliban became the dominant force. Even though they imposed a disgraceful form of violent religious intolerance, it was welcomed in the vacuum of decades of warlords trying to destroy each other.
Almost all of the misery in the middle east can be directly traced to Western powers attempting to divide and control and conquer the region to exploit their geographical importance and natural resources. Making Iraq a country nearly equal in land controlled by Kurds, Shias, and Sunnis was not a mistake. Supporting murderous thugs and dictators who could control their populations was also not a mistake. Arming violent madmen who wanted to rid the world of Godless Atheists was also not a mistake.
All of those decisions, however, do carry consequences. And consequences that the Average Joe seems incapable of understanding, let alone accepting. The real lesson is this: leave sovereign nations alone. If you have made yourself dependent on their resources, then you have only yourself to blame. Get rid of the need, or play by their rules. Otherwise you are just another nation-state wallowing in moral hypocrisy.
To put things in perspective here what was found is some summaries of some surveys from the 1980s from Russian mineral exploration. I'm not sure how new that is since western companies have had access to 1980s Russian seismic data used in oil exploration in Afganistan probably since the mid 1990s.
I think what is new is that a journalist saw it.
As for the condescending bit about things we could only dream about five years ago - a TB is still a TB even if it's on 6000 nine track reels from 1975 and in the past large projects used tapes on that sort of scale, that many reels would still fit in a small truck. Today we have convenience but that doesn't mean the inconvenient was impossible before. It has really manifested as a time and cost saving which doesn't determine if large projects go ahead or not - if it still cost a lot it would still be done.