U.S. Discovers Est. $1 Trillion of Minerals in Afghanistan
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Since there appears to be no stable economy in Afghanistan that is feasible to build, maintain, and defend, the Taliban's supporters have an incentive to invest, and its recruits have incentive to join up. Ambivalent forces in Afghanistan that might help thwart the Taliban are disincentivized to do so, because there's no path to victory, and they'd be subject to reprisals when the effort failed.
Vast mineral resources could change that. Saudi Arabia has approximately the same population as Afghanistan, but enjoys a massively better standard of living, a far stronger central government, and operates an effectively modern social safety net. If mineral investment can set that trend in motion in Afghanistan, the state may have an actual path to stability. Which alters the equation there in a way that disfavors the Taliban.
Everyone seems to be citing the case of the Congo. But the Congo isn't essentially occupied by the rest of Western Civilization. Apart from foreign corporations, which are agnostic to which regime controls the country, nobody has a stake in the Congo. That's not the case in Afghanistan.
This seems like a positive development.
I don't think this is true at all. The Taliban have significantly more military skill than the Afghan warlords they've been fighting for the last decade. Consider: if the warlords, after having gotten billions of dollars of aid from the US and tens of thousands of western soldiers helping them, still haven't been able to defeat the Taliban, how large must the disparity be. Plus, the Taliban have a reputation for being less corrupt than the warlords that currently comprise the government. There's a reason Afghanis turn to Taliban-run courts instead of going to the government ones: the justice might be crazy, but it will be impartial.
Before this find, the future of Afghanistan was pretty clear: sooner or later, there was going to be a negotiated settlement with the Taliban, culminating in some sort of power sharing agreement. Given the find, that will still probably happen, but my guess is that the Taliban get more power in the end.
From a western/Chinese companies perspective, who would you rather deal with? Religious fanatics that are honest and maintain order with horrific brutal efficiency? Or obscenely corrupt bumblers who couldn't administer their way out of a paper bag? Extraction industries have plenty of experience dealing with the former in Saudi Arabia. Given the choice, I can't imagine why they'd prefer the later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eilat_Ashkelon_Pipeline_Company
I don't think that's a fair statement. "Defeating" the Taliban, which are basically an insurgency, in a country twice the size of Germany and filled with mountains and deserts, takes a lot more than military skill or firepower. I think that the military skill is in fact secondary in that battle. The political skill is far more important. As long as the Taliban are effective in convincing local farmers to support them, they'll be there, no matter how skilled the handful of soldiers on the other side.
In other words, just because I drive a Honda to work doesn't mean that if Honda went out of business I wouldn't be able to get to work. I'd just buy a different (perhaps less reliable) car.
What 'sub-optimal' hide-away was available to bin Laden?
The same confusion often erupts when people consider southern Lebanon.
Regarding random violence in the places that the Taliban hold sway.. well ok. But highly specific violence is certainly a part of their toolkit.
I can't speak for the US, but from what I have heard from serving UK soldiers the british easily win almost all firefights simply because they are so much better equipped and better trained.
The problem comes when we have to start fighting against unpredictable IED blasts and a sizeable portion of the populous who are willing to give up their own lives to kill relatively small numbers of people.
It is probably a symptom of our ill-calibrated tactics that even the lexicon we use to talk about this is illogical.
Look, the US has spent upwards of $250 billion in Afghanistan. Afghanistan has a GDP of maybe $21 billion. If we can't bring about a government that the population sees as legitimate after blowing a decade and ten times GDP, maybe we should just accept the fact that our military is not capable of transforming alien societies in the way that we wish it could.
A contrary view was posted to HN just yesterday, as I recall.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1427866
When the national population is largely in the thralls of tribal superstition, it's easy for people who share that fanaticism (the Taliban) to gain a kind of superficial control over much of the population, but it's not clear that "religious fanatics" (your term) of the Taliban kind will retain the support of the population over the long term.
Americans focus on terrorism because everything is always always always about us, no matter what, but the Taliban can and does do many things besides terrorist attacks against western targets. Incompetence in one area does not mean that the institution is incompetent in all areas.
I think you made the point. If they completely defeat the Taliban, the aid will cease and they will have to deal with all their problems at the same time they will have no enemy to blame for them.
The only winning solution for them is to keep the Taliban around.
Companies and governemnts would prefer efficient fanatics until they play host to violent extremists who act to destabilize neighboring regimes and export violence on a large scale in pursuit of political/religious goals. You may view the war in Afghanistan as an exercise in corruption by the military-industrial complex, but it is also a valid application of the theory of forward defense to directly engage these extremists on their own territory and force them to consume their limited resources on self defense instead of using them aggressively. If a deal could be reached with the Taliban that would, with certainty, end their alliance with extremists and the export of violence to the tribal regions of Pakistan and the rest of the world, then that deal would be enthusiastically embraced just as it has been with the Saudis, but such a deal seems unlikely given the current state of the Taliban's ideology and certain ingrained Afghan cultural traits.
Documentation? Plus what does "war lord" mean in this context?
As I understand it, the Taliban would simply represent one faction of rural lords and clerics within Afghanistan. The former-northern alliance was simply another with the groups distinguished a bit by ideology but mostly by the Taliban being comprised of the dominant peshtoon ethnicity.
I mean, both the Northern Alliance (war lords presently making up the Afghan state) and the Taliban were groups origianly brought into existence by CIA interventions in the 1980s. Each faction becomes more or less corrupt, makes one or another alliance depending on the shift tides of war.
The Taliban would have the same difficulty controlling the entire country that the US and its allies currently have
Corporations are going to prefer regimes that enforce the rule of law. The Congo's primary problem (from a business standpoint) is it's lack of stability. If legal matters are not handled in a predictable way, then it's impossible for to do business in a predictable way.
While I agree that it seems like a positive development, what worries me is that Afghanistan already has a huge problem with government corruption (bribes, graft, etc). This will only make that problem worse. However, even businesses that could benefit their economy in the long run will tolerate some level of graft as long as the rule of law is enforced in a predictable manner.
IF you're a Saudi elite. Their economy relies on a huge population of foreign-workers that live as indentured serfs, are commonly brutalized, and enjoy no rights. It's also an Islamic absolute monarchy with less political freedom than China.
It's good that Afghanistan has a resource potentially more valuable than the drug trade and its inputs.
from the second page -
In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.
I must embarrassingly say that you're wholly correct, the United States was rather late to arrive at this party.
China's already built roads to the area, and US soldiers are protecting the Chinese construction effort
Sorry for the snarky tone but seriously, it's this kind of ridiculous macho attitude that got the US into so much trouble in the first place.
The United States has no need to seize any assets. We simply stop defending the roads, at which point the insurgents will begin seizing any convoy that attempts to get through.
My statement was not one of opinion. It was one of fact. If the Chinese do not behave as the United States wants on those stretches of highway, the highways will cease to be accessible to the Chinese.
China never "behaves" as the US wants. Where have you been for the past 50 years?
Furthermore, the direct beneficiary of Chinese mineral wealth is you, the US Citizen. Who do you think produces a majority of the goods you consume as well as finances the majority of your government's debt?
US and Chinese interests are inexorably linked - which is probably why the US Army is protecting Chinese infrastructure.
Step into the 21st century and let go of your borderline racist delusions like "If the Chinese do not behave..." - or what? The US will launch another proxy war and lose just like in Vietnam and Korea? The powers that be in both hemispheres have realized that there are better strategies to wealth, and they have been implementing them efficiently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid#Global_shortage_of_poppy...
Opium poppies grow well in Afghanistan and farmers already know how to cultivate and prepare it for shipping in large quantities.
Potential mineral riches are spiffy and all, but it seems foolish to toss money at projects which require large-scale construction and worker training when an existing high-demand product already exists to productively employ the populace.
These folks don't yet have infrastructure capable of large-scale mineral extraction. Why not build upon useful agricultural exports and start from there?
I understand your argument to not abandon the poppies, but do you really think "foolish" is the right word to describe pursuing vast amounts of minerals that are in high demand? It's literally digging money out of the ground. Wouldn't the large-scale construction and worker training be funded by the profits from the minerals?
When pairing mineral resources with a chaotic government like Afghanistan's, I can't help but picture kleptocratic scenarios like Nigeria, Congo or the like and that's what brings 'foolish' to mind.
If mining started there today we would certainly enjoy the fruits of the labour, but I'm not sure the people would see anything from it. A few other posters have mentioned 'The Resource Curse' and I think Afghanistan would end up more like Congo than Norway if minerals were extracted in quantity from their soil.
I think starting with agricultural exports and building slowly from there would provide a more stable economic foundation.
The next logical phase of exploration would be having geologists hiking and driving around on these prospects to try to understand the specific geology of each. If things look good then maybe a program of surface level geophysical surveys, which are far more precise than aerial surveys (though still pretty fuzzy). Finally some (very expensive) exploratory drilling, then a lot more drilling to establish with some certainty the size of the deposit. Now you have a mineable property.
By the way, at every step you need a bunch of skilled people on location who currently have plenty of work opportunities in non-war zones.
Sure, there are almost certainly good mines to be found since it's a huge country and mineral exploration has been on hold for thirty years and was pretty spotty before then. But saying that aerial geophysics surveys confirm this is pretty funny.
EDIT: It looks like some ground geophysical surveys have been done as well. But no drilling as far as I can tell from the story.
Can anyone in the know describe how this works? It sounds interesting.
The main problem the oil industry faces is the density of oil is similar to the density of salt. The only way to tell one from the other is to drill an insanely expensive exploratory well. My dad said half the time they hit salt. Really expensive salt.
My geologist (-in-training) friend tells me that you would actually look for the salt because a geological process/property often causes oil to be found around salt domes.
Salt is less dense than rock around it, so in terms of geological time it will tend to get pushed up relatively fast. As it goes up, it will bend up the layers of rock around it, breaking the lower ones as it goes through them and deforming the ones above. Salt itself is practically impermeable, and so are some layers of rock. Oil, which is fairly light, will flow up and collect in pockets formed against the edge of the salt dome where a layer of impermeable rock has been bent up.
In http://faculty.ksu.edu.sa/alhomadhi/Evaporates/Oil%20Traps%2... the pink layer is mostly impermeable, the grey-brown layer is porous and therefore permeable. Oil is trapped against the salt dome in the pockets created by the dome itself.
I understand not every salt dome will have oil around it, but there's only one way to find out. I don't think exploratory wells are that expensive, but of course they aren't exactly cheap either. However, drilling around the domes will still get you better chances than just drilling blindly.
I don't think it's the drilling itself as much as it is the in/accessibility of the site. They were usually doing surveys in the Andes or the Amazon river basin. Not exactly friendly territory.
They lost two crews while in South America. Mountains, bad weather and an expensive/tight schedule are a bad combination. He said they could never know where they went down, so they would watch the villages to see where airplane parts hit the markets. Pretty sad stuff.
In particular, I doubt it would have been feasible to do this with drones back when mbenjaminsmith's father was working on this (or at least I got the impression this was a fair while ago). And even now, since the primary users of the technology are still military and other government agencies, it's not exactly cheap. Depending on how the company values a life and what are the estimates of risk, it might not happen for a while.
The GRACE satellites are a neat instrument. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Recovery_and_Climate_Ex...
Afghanistan went from having no chance to a moderate chance. It's no cause for celebration, but it's not necessarily the worst thing in the world either.
If you were a mining engineer, would you want to travel to Afghanistan and spend a year or two setting up a new mine there?
Do they? The Saudi Arabian ruling classes do very well indeed, but how does the average Saudi do? Hint: google "Saudi Arabia inequality" and "Saudi Arabia oppression". It's the resource curse at work.
That's the official line, anyway. The whole issue of who is a citizen, and who has merely been there for years is part of it.
They were desperately poor before they went to Saudi Arabia, the Saudis merely gave them a marginally better option.
the Saudis gave them what looked like a marginally better option.
It's not a difficult issue at all, you're a citizen if the law says so. No one promised guest workers citizenship and I doubt they expected it. Only westerners subscribe to the novel idea that anyone they let into their countries are also owed a part of it (citizenship, welfare etc.).
"the Saudis gave them what looked like a marginally better option."
There are five million guest workers, a lack of horror stories would be surprising. I'm not convinced coercion to stay is widespread before I see some statistics, if coercion to stay is not widespread then I trust that most of the five million guest workers know what is best for them.
Not necessarily. The U.S. economy was built on drugs when it was starting out. Even today most of our famous colleges are named after drug families.
Which famous colleges do you have in mind here?
Yep, now they can join modern, enlightened, resource-rich nations like Saudi Arabia and the Congo.
Oh, wait.
Look, I'm sure there are countries that might be able to successfully navigate a resource find like this. They'd probably be places with few internal divisions, a relatively homogeneous population, a history of stable government and well established cultural and legal norms for dividing and sharing power. You know, the kind of place where everyone really really believes that if their candidate loses an election, they will not be dragged out into the street and shot by the other candidate's private militia. Afghanistan fails all those criteria. So, if you can find any examples of a country that fails as badly as Afghanistan does successfully avoiding the resource curse, I'd be real interested in studying it.
Do you really expect Afghanistan to turn into Canada or Australia, much less Norway?
Look to the Philippines if you want an example of what good can eventually come from U.S. occupation of a fractious country. And, unlike the Philippines, Afghanistan is not an archipelago whose thousands of islands practically define the concept of obnoxious-natural-barrier.
The Chinese influence bodes well too. China practices fair and even-handed oppression, rather than trying to exterminate the One True Enemy.
I don't understand what this has to do with it. Do you mean that absence of Africans and Arabs helps in successfully building up a democracy and mining minerals?
Right?
Go read some history. Specifically, all of it regarding the middle east and africa up until the present day. Heck, you can even just look at a map for a few minutes and marvel at how straight the lines are. Maybe you'll reach some more enlightened conclusions about the way things are.
I bet the answers don't have a lot to do with local rents and food prices. And for Johannesburg and Mecca tend towards infinity.
The way things are is that some people are uncivilized and appear unable to become civilized. This is not racism, just the data as they are. Which is why, in the context of this discussion, Afghanistan need not necessarily turn into the Congo because it did not start out as the Congo, and why the Chinese influence is not so ominous.
I'd much rather live in Harlem than Omaha or Frankfurt. Culture and metropolitanism are far more important to me than the amount of pigment in my immediate neighborhood, and it's very safe these days.
Your definitions of civilized are an opinion. The citizens of Mecca think you're uncivilized for a number of reasons, and I think you're uncivilized for others.
Anyways, I'm just thankful that most people don't think like you do -- I certainly wouldn't want to be lumped into the same category as you for the crime of (presumably) sharing a pigment level. People might conclude it's the natural state of white people to be deliberately ignorant about everything except their own little suburban town in rural America.
I don't quite understand how pg's essay applies to the Belgian Congo, is there some specific paragraph you are referring to?
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1713275,00.htm... http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1713275,00.htm...
My objection is with the after the fact justification of colonialism. Charity was never an objective of colonial efforts, it would be very naive to think otherwise. The fact that the rapid decolonization (which was by no means the end of foreign intervention in Congolese affairs) did not lead to a stable and prosperous independant state, is no argument in favour of colonization either.
I'm honestly surprised of the upvotes these neo-colonial comments are getting.
PS - Obama if you're reading this, I'm available for hire as PR consultant or Press Secretary. I'm that good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
Finding tremendous mineral resources usually encourages corruption, collapses immature democratic institutions, and hollows out the industrial sector of the economy.
Nigeria, Holland, Congo, Venezuela, the story is always the same. The only country which has managed to avoid this situation is Norway.
And perhaps Britain? But that was before any country had any industrial sector at all, and the Britons used their coal and iron ore to start the original industrial revolution.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/185/40...
If China underbids us and we're unable to leverage state power or anything of that nature, I'm sure we'll just lick our wounds and give up. Anything else would be really, really stupid.
Chinese mining companies have been quietly performing exploratory studies in the north for the past few years. It was the Chinese activity that actually tipped us off that there could be significant copper and lithium deposits.
The Afghan people have repelled every major imperial power including Alexander the Great, the Persian Saffavids, Ghengis Khan, the Moghul Empire, the Russian Empire, the British Empire, and the United Soviet Socialist Republics. As a result, Afghanistan is one of the last remaining pieces of land on the planet that has never been properly surveyed, mapped, or mined.
The ground is untouched. The nation borders China, which has an almost insatiable appetite for minerals. The United States has over one hundred thousand troops present. It is a recipe for a disaster of the highest order.
It is a member of the WTO and is the world's second
largest trading power behind the US with a total
international trade of US$2.21 trillion – US$1.20
trillion in exports (#1) and US$1.01 trillion in imports (#2).
There's just way too much to lose over a trillion bucks (especially since they have 1.6 trillion in US Securities)
From the minerals described, it would actually give Afghanistan the potential to be a haven for technology manufacture, which can easily be stepped into full out tech-based economy.
However non-traditional warfare like the Cold War is similarly completely out of the question. The Cold War dragged on for so long because the USA and USSR were economically independent of each other, they both had mega-quantities of resources and production in their respective regions of control. They couldn't fight outright, but they had enough resources to supply everyone else to do the fighting.
Yet the US-Chinese economies are so intrinsically connected that a war would cause immediate trade embargoes between the countries and would cause an all-out collapse of the respective economies. US desperately relies on Chinese manufacturing for everything from what we wipe our arses with to our knives, computers and even a large part of our ship production (civilian and military production both reside squarely within China's region of control). Similarly China relies wholly on US and European dollars to even have a sustainable economy.
We're not talking $1 trillion in cold hard cash likes some uber-lottery, we're talking a likely payout over the next 50-100+ years. It would be more advantageous for China and the US to team up to extract the resources than to even think about arguing over them.
Review the precedent. The argument that economic linkage would prevent warfare was first raised prior to World War I. Global and Continental trade failed to prevent proxy conflict in Africa, the Baltics, and all out conflict across all of Europe. Britain and Germany had a level of trade and codependent exchange far greater that of modern day China and the United States.
Not to mention that the United States and China have fought and are continuing to fight proxy conflict today in the Sudan, northern India, Vietnam, Burma, Thailand, and North Korea.
Your theory has been tested. It is false.
To assume that the United States and China simply cannot engage in warfare is a dangerous delusion. And I assure you, it is not a delusion shared by the Chinese government.
The U.S. deployment wasn’t intended to protect the Chinese investment - the largest in Afghanistan’s history - but to strangle Taliban infiltration into the capital of Kabul. But if the mission provides the security that a project to revive Afghanistan’s economy needs, the synergy will be welcome.
http://www.sananews.com.pk/english/2009/03/08/chinas-thirst-...
We are looking at a repeat of the US-Soviet conflict, replayed in Central Asia, with stakes unimaginably high.
The mineral deposits are significant in that they are a major catalyst, forcing events to happen over years rather than decades. The minerals will pull in corporations controlled directly by the Chinese state, and our own psuedo-public conglomerates such as Betchel and Halliburton. As a rule, soldiers follow merchants. It is a potentially dangerous situation that is strongly foreshadowed by historical precedent.
There is a reason nearly all Eurasian empires of the past two millennia have found themselves fighting in the Afghan hills.
Afghanistan is not some simple backwater. It sits astride the only viable land passes between Europe, China, and India. It is the natural crossroads of the world, the only unsecured military path into the Punjab, and a major potential trade route between three billion consumers.
Afghanistan is unique because it could be phenomenally wealthy, but as a result, it is simply too dangerous for any one power to allow a rival to control it. The Brits invaded to keep it away from the Russians. The United States sponsered insurgents to keep it away from the Soviets.
The most stable outcome is for no one to possess it, and for the country to remain in ruin. But from time to time, a Great Power tries to seize the area, drawing a response from the other powers. That time may be again be approaching.
That struck me as the most important comment regarding this article.
The Taliban seem to have the organizational resources to rule a country. Wouldn't a Taliban ascendancy in Afghanistan also be a "stable" outcome in the short term? (There would be concern that their ideology would prevent stability in the long term, given the existence of Israel and secular western industrial powers.)
I wonder how much of the U.S.'s war expenses are going to more or less clear the way for Chinese commercial (/state) interests. But I'm not privy to the inside information needed for an informed analysis.
And from another perspective, the war's been fought with money borrowed from China (directly or indirectly), so maybe in a way they're just getting what they paid for (except, the U.S. is still on the hook for repayment).
1. The most dangerous threat to the United States is not the continued rise of China.
2 .The most dangerous threats to American security are non-state actors, particularly terrorist and insurgent networks.
3. It is only a matter of time before these non-state actors develop or steal a nuclear device.
4. The most powerful and organized non-state actors are terrorist networks in Islamic regions.
5.These networks currently target the United States, our dependent nations in Europe, and our outpost in Israel.
6. These networks cannot be destroyed using existing United States and allied intelligence assets.
7. Therefore, the logical alternative is to retarget Islamic anger against a rival nation.
8. Islamic anger is stoked primarily by the United States military presence in the Near East and Central Asia.
9. The United States military positions in this region are overextended and unsustainable.
10. Military actors tend to follow commercial interests.
11. Therefor, the proper strategy is for the United States to execute a controlled retreat to fallback positions within these regions, while simultaneously encouraging Chinese investment.
As we stand down, the Chinese will rush to fill the breach. We can continue to hold the non-negotiable assets in the Near East, while allowing China to take Central Asia.
Simultaneously, the United States launches a concerted psyops campaign across the Muslim world portraying Chinese atrocities against their Islamic subjects in Xinjiang.
The end result is that Muslim anger is partially redirected against China, thus lessening the danger to United States interests, and giving the People's Republic a strong incentive to join us as equal partners in the fight against global terrorism.
They figure, let the US quell the beast, then go in and make deals with whatever Afghani government is in power at the moment the US leaves. China doesn't nation-build, it makes deals; which makes it a bit of an aloof superpower.
The Taliban (on the world stage) is relatively innocuous currently compared to what they could become if they had the backing of China. Of course, aiding an unstable militant group would be risky but, if there's enough money involved, it could happen. (It's not like the CIA hasn't tried the same thing numerous times in the past.)
I think worst case scenario is that we could see a completely Taliban-operated Afghanistan that is heavily backed by China, enough so that China has a controlling interest (so to speak) in Afghanistan's affairs. If Afghanistan were to become a pseudo-vassal state, we could see a US backed Iraq or Israel come into some kind of confrontation with the state, although at that scale we get back to problems presented by nuclear war.
I'm betting $10 on a USA victory now.
People these days are too hung up on making money fast. A few years to develop and build a profit engine really isn't that much.
And what does "enlightened" mean, anyway? Does it mean "follows my ideals"?
I think at first it meant putting science above superstition, but now I think it means treating all citizens with respect. We're in the civil rights age of enlightenment.
That is an excellent point. It reminds me of the "Money does not motivate developers" articles on here recently.
In our world though, powers will struggle for control of the purse strings. Strong men will rule, aided by the US, the Taliban, both, or more. The mines will become inland islands to themselves as the people get promises of a better life.
Let's hope something along the lines of the former happens - would be world changing.
http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
I'd prefer links as footnotes, but using markdown even when it isn't supported isn't so bad.
And no, GWB's administration didn't invent this ideology. Neither did PNAC, or any of the other conspiracy-nut targets. This kind of thing has been going on for thousands of years.
For their opium?
[Edit: Afghanistan, not Iraq.]
... OK, if not for the instability it would be useful for pipelines, but what else? (Serious question.)
Edit: And I think that's because HN has a heavy American user base, and I don't think Americans get very good news (or are even very interested in the complexities of modern geo-politics). Good or bad, I think that's a fair assessment. So what you get are a lot of: "America is in Afghanistan and Iraq for altruistic reasons that have nothing to do with the resources under these people's feet."
What a stupid thing to say. Do you think that Americans who visit HN are prone to bouts of Fox News watching? Do you think Google News or bbc.co.uk is censored here?
> HN sadly has never been very politically enlightened when it comes to America and geo-politics.
This thread in particular shows great enlightenment on geo-politics. Just read the top comments.
In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.
Is it just me, or is anyone else tired of perpetual war?
When a government depends on resources for their revenue, they are setting themselves up for failure when prices fall.
Norway could have been in a similar situation with oil, but they avoided it:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feabd...
Hopefully Bolivia learns something from Norway and this does not happen to them (Venezuela definitely didn't take a hint).
Similarly, if Afghanistan does not set itself up well, it could have the same resource dependency problem.
[Like the East India Trading Company led to 150 years of British rule, I just hope history does not repeat itself.]
This is not going to be a good example, but unless you give consent, do you want some overwhelming authority barging into your household saying that they struck gold while you and your significant other are having a disagreement (and that you've been doing this and resolving for a while)?
But then again, who am I to steer things like these? Government contractors make up a good percentage of our economy, technology included.
You often get such radicalized elements is because of aggressive external pressure. Just as the Taliban was a response to the USSR, you have numerous Palestinian groups who are just as adamant.
Nigeria has 3% adult HIV seroprevalence. Afghanistan, 0.01%.
18.8% of Nigerians die before reaching five years old, and 23.5% of Afghans.
Nigeria's HDI is 0.511, putting it at rank #158 out of 182 countries. Afghanistan's is 0.352, #181.
Which numbers are you looking at? Nigeria looks better off, but not far better off.
But there are HUGE deposits of Lithium in the USA.
You know who owns the rights to them? Canadian corporations.
They refuse to mine them because it's not economically beneficial (yet) they want the price to go up.
http://counterpunch.org/prashad06112010.html
"On May 30, at 10:06am, the United States exchequer turned over its trillionth dollar to the U. S. armed forces for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A trillion dollars is a lot of money. As my friends at the National Priorities Project put it, if I made a $1 million a year, it would take me a million years to earn a trillion dollars. The U. S. government expended the same amount in nine years, fighting two wars. So what did our trillion tax dollars buy?"
Alan Greenspan: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil” (The Age of Turbulence, 2007, p. 463).
Me: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Afghanistan war is largely about gas and mineral wealth” (My unpublished international bestselling debut, 2011, p. 231).
While I'm not for war of any kind, and least we seem to have a semi-legitimate reason to be over there now. However, if there was trillions of dollars of valuable minerals, one could venture to guess we knew about those a while ago.
From the article:
"An internal _Pentagon_ memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,”"
and
"“There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, _commander of the United States Central Command_, said in an interview on Saturday."
and
"“No one has tested that law; no one knows how it will stand up in a fight between the central government and the provinces,” observed Paul A. Brinkley, deputy undersecretary of defense for business and leader of the _Pentagon_ team that discovered the deposits"
and
"The _Pentagon_ task force has already started trying to help the Afghans set up a system to deal with mineral development."
and
"Soon, the _Pentagon_ business development task force brought in teams of American mining experts to validate the survey’s findings, and then briefed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Mr. Karzai."
If someone points out that the US Pentagon has discovered riches under the soil of a foreign country its troops are waging a war in I'll certainly point out how much that war effort has cost and is costing each and every person in the States.
(regarding the supposedly huge lithium find there)
"The US planned 9/11 in order to invade Afghanistan to get at it's vast mineral resources - especially lithium and copper to power the future of energy - just like oil in the Middle East!!" - Alex Jones in Parody
I've always heard that Iran's plans would involve the usual tools like missiles, mines, small boats, etc., all of which have obvious counters. I'm not saying it would be a cakewalk, and not even considering how things would change when they go nuclear, but "easily" doesn't strike me as accurate.
There's also the minor detail that they import over open water 1/2 of their petroleum distillates, a naval war in that area would bring their economy to a near halt. Drop a few bombs on their only refinery (I've read they have only one, but whatever the number, it's small enough for us and their neighbors to take out) and their country reverts to a pre-industrialized state with mass starvation.
Iran is exquisitely vulnerable, which is certainly one of their reasons for pursuing the bomb (and one reason they might continue even after a regime change).
True, but the actual channel through which supertankers navigate is only 6 miles wide (two miles for each direction of traffic with a two mile gutter to separate). The rest of the channel at that point is either within Iranian territorial waters or too shallow for supertankers to safely transit.
I've always heard that Iran's plans would involve the usual tools like missiles, mines, small boats, etc., all of which have obvious counters. I'm not saying it would be a cakewalk, and not even considering how things would change when they go nuclear, but "easily" doesn't strike me as accurate.
Oh, I very much agree with you. I'm sure Iran would follow through on all those options before they did something as difficult to undo as scuttling tankers to block the Strait.
There's also the minor detail that they import over open water 1/2 of their petroleum distillates, a naval war in that area would bring their economy to a near halt. Drop a few bombs on their only refinery (I've read they have only one, but whatever the number, it's small enough for us and their neighbors to take out) and their country reverts to a pre-industrialized state with mass starvation.
Yeah, that would be awful for them. But given the low elasticity for gasoline consumption, cutting off 40% of daily oil flow would be an economic disaster for us. Businesses would grind to a halt as tens of millions of people would no longer be able to afford to go to work. For starters.
Iran is exquisitely vulnerable, which is certainly one of their reasons for pursuing the bomb (and one reason they might continue even after a regime change).
Absolutely. But the entire industrialized world is also vulnerable. And if we start a conflict and do take out Iran's sole refinery while blockading them to prevent them from getting refined products, they will have every incentive to block the Strait. Right?
Fun fact: This was my dad's job in the Marine Corps for awhile. He's still bitter about the invasion of Grenada, since he's convinced it would have gone much more easily if they followed the contingency plan he drew up rather than handling it the way they did.
I don't think I'm the only one who hopes someone will FOI that if and when its secrecy expires.
(Disclaimer: I've little to no idea on how secrecy and disclosure of documents works in the U.S. military.)
If you're truly curious, Wikipedia has an article on War Plan Red: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Plan_Red