If these riches are accessible, why haven't the US helped the national government exploit it during the last 20 years of occupation, or themselves? Seems like a bit of a sensationalized headline.
They face the same problem the US occupation did in reverse: the country is inherently inaccessible. There are a few scattered bits of railway. There are a few long mountainous roads out. It is landlocked. It is uneconomic to ship raw minerals other than by rail or sea, since they have low value density. Step 1 would be "build a thousand miles of railway", especially if they're thinking of shipping to China.
(This is why the a mainexport was opium: very high value density makes it worth shipping over the passes. Same goes for gold mentioned in a sibling comment)
The US has been de facto doing business with anyone, especially the Taliban, to get raw resources (in very dangerous and environmentally damaging ways) for use in some markets for many years.
I'm curious what happened to those arrangements and facilities. I think most of the people profiled in the OCCRP are stateside now (Emily Scott King is in beautiful Miami).
On a side note, "artisanally mined" looks like a euphemism for "dug out of the dirt with spades and bare hands by the desperately poor serving brutal overlords", or something similar. Pretty much like the "artisan" child cobalt miners of Congo. See [1] Is my phone powered by child labour?
[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2016/06/drc-coba...
(i.e. in answer to your question, the US would have "helped" if it was oil that was in the ground)
Julian Assange in 2011: "The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war"
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1427929346262642688
US veteran that oversaw training of Afghan forces, 2021: "I would sit in on staff meetings, because part of my position there was with a Joint Command that was building the Afghan military and police force — the division that I worked with was about training and policy for the Afghan police. And that also included arming and funding them. I don’t think I could overstate that this was a system just basically designed for funneling money and wasting or losing equipment."
https://mtracey.substack.com/p/a-big-money-funneling-operati...
And now said equipment is confirmed lost or in the hands of the Taliban: "A U.S. defense official on Monday confirmed the Taliban’s sudden accumulation of U.S.-supplied Afghan equipment is enormous."
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-army-taliban-185017ba29...
When there was a draft and people were invested in the outcome of the wars, politicians made their names by going after war profiteers.
The history of the United Fruit Company, the CIA and the term "banana republic" are worth looking into if you're unfamiliar.
The problem with these conspiracy theories of everything is that they actually never explain anything.
The reason the war was continued was not only and not primarily because a transnational security elite was washing money blah blah blah.
It was primarily because those voters who supported the war had hope for a better outcome. And their hope was greater than their reason.
Without hope, no manipulation would work.
One answer could be: it was Trump who started this and he wanted to stop the corruption, and the US is getting better. Another answer could be: it hasn't stopped, its just a lull before the US starts up endless war again.
I suspect that one can make any argument fit any reasons from any angle and there will be some truth in some of each of the ideas.
No matter how many stupid looks they show on TV and how much "complete surprise" they proclaim, there's people been making a living off this war for a while and they saw the writing on the wall.
Do we expect they've packed up and gone home to a quiet retirement? Or is the next chapter of "how much shit can we waste" already on railcars?
The war in Afghanistan was still fairly popular among the general public until very recently.
Aside from that, here's a quote from Biden's speech about Afghanistan I find relevant.
"Today, the terrorist threat has metastasized well beyond Afghanistan: al Shabaab in Somalia, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Nusra in Syria, ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and establishing affiliates in multiple countries in Africa and Asia. These threats warrant our attention and our resources."
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/20...
But We Have Oil