Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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.
This is a problem both the left and the right don't seem to be able to face. The majority of people in a lot of middle eastern counties support a kind of religious tyranny whether they are wealthy or not. Not all people, by any means, but a majority. Bring democracy and wealth to these places without liberalism is not going to get the results we want. In fact it's going to bring disaster, by giving radical religious tyranny democratic legitimacy and the wealth to throw their weight around.
The liberal part of rich liberal democracies is the most important ingredient. Democracy is more of a safety valve, the riches a by-product (and luck, of course).
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.
What's up with that?
What's up is that the people who brought you Iraqi WMDs are lying again.
The numbers are fictitious and "Stephen Peters, the head of the USGS’s Afghanistan Minerals Project, said that he was unaware of USGS involvement in any new surveying for minerals in Afghanistan in the past two years. 'We are not aware of any discoveries of lithium,' he said."
So the Pentagon has basically gathered up a bunch of old data, done some overflight surveys with no ground truth, and made up numbers. Anyone who knows anything about geology knows what a tricky business mineral exploration is, even without deliberate fraud, and yet the American media reacted with breathless excitment rather than honest and fully justified scepticism to this propaganda.
What's up with that?
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
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.
There is a long-standing belief in the west that you can fight religious intolerance and hatred with prosperity and education (i.e. "These people are only religious fanatics because they're poor and desperate, or because they're just ignorant and in need of education." But the hard truth is that this is just not the case. You can give a fanatic wealth and education, and that won't change them a bit. If you don't believe it, read the bio of the most infamous one of all.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.