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.
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.
It's a funny thing that having wonderful natural resources dampens other parts of the economy. It's called Dutch Disease, and was diagnosed some time ago. Kind of makes you want to re-read Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
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 is all three.
I doubt it is hype. There's technologies deployed right this moment in Afghanistan that people could only dream about as little as five years ago. The sheer flood of data generated by any attempt to map an entire country's mineral deposits would have been impossible to even just store (much less process) when people were unaccustomed to using the term "TB". It is not in the least surprising that we're now finding things like this that were there all along right under our nose. If only we had the capability to store a kilobyte of spectral data per square meter of a whole country.
I also doubt that this will make Afghanistan any better off. In terms of mineral wealth, Africa is the richest continent on earth. Most of the interesting metals (from uranium to gold) and most of the expensive non-metal materials (from diamonds to sapphires) are found in Africa. And all that wealth has bough it ... what exactly?
(And I am not in the least suggesting that the Pentagon has been mapping Afghanistan in a humanitarian effort to chart its wealth. The same spectroscopic technologies that tell you "this mountain is full of Chromium" will also tell you that it is "full of opium", "full of dynamite" or even "full of people").
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
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.