No, The U.S. Didn’t Just ‘Discover’ a $1 Trillion Afghan Motherlode
wired.com
wired.com
I, personally, have a more cynical and conspiratorial view of things: I think the U.S. intelligence cooked up the trillion figure in order to wane the production of opium for at least a decade, by promising Afghans a better bounty and a reason to form national unity. Mineral extraction is an expensive undertaking that can't be done by stealth mobile units in friendly pockets; the whole country has to come together.
What strengthens my suspicion is the U.S's willingness to announce this "finding", despite the possibility of undermining its presence there. The Taliban can always say the Americans knew about this all along and have fabricated excuses to invade us.
$50 on longbet, with a 10 year maturity :-)
A good rule of thumb: ignorance and incompetence explains well over 99% of the unfortunate aspects of the world and evil or deliberate planning well under 1%.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
How does someone previously citing undiscovered resources contradict the idea of those resources now being discovered?
If, hypothetically, Wire had shown that the military had no new information but simply took the previous general reports of resources existing and labeled that a "discovery", then Wired would have refuted the military's claims. Unfortunately, the wired article doesn't seem to provide enough information for this.
I became interested in Afghanistan in 2001, along with everybody else. Before that, my only exposure to the country was my reading of "The Man who would be King", by Kipling.
Everything that I've heard about the Afghanistan economy has had to do with opium and heroin. To have it announced that there was a very real possibility that there may be a way to grow their economy in a very real and significant way, and a way that benefits the rest of the world, rather than harms it, is exciting news to me.
Some of us became interested in Afghanistan back in '79, when the Soviets invaded, and President Carter (remember him?) re-instated draft registration. Seemed pretty important at the time, but seems to be forgotten now...
How about educating the population, improving the infrastructure and so on? Lots of places without any real natural resources seem to do fine.
Really? Who? Japan that's who ... and everybody marvels about how the heck they managed it. Who else? Not fair saying any country that had colonies once, even if they no longer do, as they got their "jump start" from the resources of their colonies.
What country has actually succeeded without natural resources? Keep in mind that natural resources aren't just minerals. They may be geographic circumstance, such as "the only land route between X and Y", or ocean access, or "the shortest route between A and P", etc.
It's very fashionable to say that you can get by on brains alone, but it turns out that more is generally required.
After the war, citizens of South Korea volunteered, for no pay, to rebuild infrastructure (roads, factories).
From the 60s through the 80s, there was one singular goal, namely, building the nation and becoming a prosperous society.
I think that kind of scenario is a little harder to reproduce in the more heterogenous parts of the world. How do you propose getting opposing ethnicities in other countries to pull together like that?
Greed?
The colonies thing is sort of dodging the question. How did England end up with India as a colony, or Belgium with the Congo? They had great military strength, grounded in their technological edge, despite being poorer in natural resources than India and the Congo. But that same technological edge can be used today to trade for resources instead of taking them by brute force — or, as Germany showed during WWI and South Africa showed during the sanctions, to get by with less natural resources.
India and the Congo weren't really countries when the Europeans showed up: what we now think of as those countries had vast collections of tribes more than anything else. They hadn't (and to some extent still haven't) undergone the unification that many European countries were undergoing or had undergone when colonization started.
Even England had problems with Scotland and Wales up until relatively recently, and problems with Ireland up until about ten years ago.
(a) Some of the colonial powers were small tribes or collections of tribes themselves. England is one example, as you say, but Belgium and Portugal are surely the poster children for this. Spain is still a vast collection of tribes more than anything else.
(b) Some of the colonized regions had strong central government, notably the Inka empire Tawantinsuyu.
(c) Forms of strong central government have existed in many times and places in the past (Carthage, the Roman Empire, arguably the Roman Catholic Church before Westphalia, ancient Egypt, Axum, China at some periods, Tawantinsuyu, the Maya empire) without kicking off an industrial revolution. Indeed, the argument has often been made that it was precisely Europe's lack of strong central government, together with the current state of philosophy, that permitted the Industrial Revolution to begin.
Source: I've lived-in and worked on mining projects in the developing world and saw all this stuff happen first hand.
- It is bad to be resource rich and have a bad government.
- It is good to be resource rich and have a good government.
Why not instead just say
- How good things are will significantly depend on how good the government is.
Since that claim holds true for both resource rich and resource poor countries.
Google "canadian tar sands"
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feabd...
What resources change is how much outside observers notice. Are the millions of people living in squalid hell-holes under corrupt regimes any better off for not having resources? Hardly, it's more just that the world doesn't give a shit, because their plight isn't interesting.
1. Until there is real analysis of the ground you cannot predict its size and value.
2. There's still a problem of how to export all that minerals from Afghanistan. Even with peaceful and unarmed population, the country doesn't have any notable infrastructure (trains, harbor), many of those areas are in mountains etc.
I don't buy the concept that this fixes more problems than it causes.
And of course everyone who are spending (or were spent) money for a war (British, Russian, US) were aware what they would get as a reward.
But how can we forget the reason US told us why they invading Afghanistan? Fighting Terrorism (under the name of AlQaida).
The image is clear now.
Edit: Assuming US knows that before war.
After all, if the Afghan War has already cost the US $739.8 Billion dollars [1], even $1 Trillion doesn't leave much for infrastructure investment and a reasonable profit margin.