Bush''s genius: $1 Trillion in minerals found in Afghanistan

[John Picard]

Afghan mineral wealth raises host of questions

The Times' Risen notes that the data on which the new trillion-dollar assessment is based were collected during a 2007 survey. Last year the Pentagon conducted a study to "translate the technical data to measure the potential economic value of the mineral deposits," he reports, and came up with $1 trillion. And the Associated Press notes that just last month at a U.S. Institute of Peace event, Afghan President Hamid Karzai estimated his country's mineral wealth could total as much as $3 trillion.
So why is this information coming out now?
The war in Afghanistan is not going well. Just Friday, the Times' Dexter Filkins reported that Karzai himself is said to doubt that the Americans can succeed and is reportedly working on brokering his own deal with the Taliban outside the auspices of NATO. From the Pentagon's perspective, recasting old information about the country's hard-to-access mineral reserves as a potentially game-changing bounty — and then handing it to the Times — could ward off slacking resolve in the American public and create a new argument for sticking with the war. It's certainly easier to imagine a stable, democratic endgame for Afghanistan if you've got a trillion dollars in mineral wealth to play with.

Finally, the potential $1 trillion question in all this is: Who will get the rights to these minerals? China is already operating the largest mine in Afghanistan — and has yet to produce any copper. George W. Bush's administration famously argued that oil exploitation would offset the costs of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but American companies were largely shut out of oil concessions there. In the case of Afghanistan, the USGS has apparently invested significant resources into mapping the mineral wealth, but it's unclear whether private mining companies were involved as well — leaving open the question of whether the U.S. will get a cut of any development.

 

[JarodRussell]

If Obama and the Afghan government makes no mistakes, this can save the entire Afghan nation. 50,000 USD per Afghan citizen, that's incredible.

 

[Marc]

If Obama and the Afghan government makes no mistakes, this can save the entire Afghan nation. 50,000 USD per Afghan citizen, that's incredible.

I wonder what impact it will have on commodities prices? If the reserves are as big as claimed they could see a fall in the price for lithium in which case the value of what's there could actually drop.

Then there's the question of how long it would take to dig up i.e what's the long term prospects? Could it just be a comparative flash in the pan or some that that will provide money for decades to come.

 

[gturner]

^ In the NY Times article they implied that it might take a decade just to get production up and running, since they're essentially starting from ground zero. From what I've seen on Afghanistan, they barely have any roads that could support continuous heavy truck traffic.

On a side note, it makes me wonder if these resources extend into Waziristan where the Taliban nest. It might provide the Pakistani government with a good economic reason to re-exert control there.

 

[Davros]

Will Afghanistan hire Dick Cheney as an advisor?

Not if they have any brains.

 

[bigdaddy]

The trillion will just about cover the endless war there.

 

[gturner]

^ Oh, a trillion is way too much. Through FY2010 we've only spent $299 billion in Afghanistan. We spent three times that on a stimulus package that saved or created an unknown number of jobs, which (based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics) is less jobs than we had before we started saving and creating them. We've probably done better at creating jobs in Afghanistan mud brick industry than we have here at home.

 

[Ward Fowler]

After all the Afghanis have been through, I hope they can better their lives thanks to these discoveries. Hopefully it will turn into a win-win situation.

 

[gturner]

Well, the important strategic consideration is to make sure Afghanistan's massive lithium reserves don't fall into the hands of the Taliban, who will certainly exploit them for the trace amounts of dilithium which they can use to power warp drives and advanced weapons like phasers.

 

[Marc]

Seems that the knowledge of the mineral riches in Afghanistan might actually be old news with the Bush Administration knowningin 2007 and the Russians knowing in the 1980s

Were it not for the byline of James Risen, a New York Times reporter currently in a legal battle with the Obama administration over the identity of his sources, a second read of his blockbuster A1 story this morning, U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan, would engender some fairly acute skepticism. For one, a simple Google search identifies any number of previous stories with similar details.


The Bush Administration concluded in 2007 that Afghanistan was potentially sitting on a goldmine of mineral resources and that this fact ought to become a central point of U.S. policy in bolstering the government.

The Soviets knew this in 1985, as a 2002 history of the region's economy shows:

Afghanistan has reserves of a wide variety of nonenergy mineral resources, including iron, chrome, copper, silver, gold barite sulfur, talc, magnesium, mica, marble, and lapis lazuli. By 1985 Soviet surveys had also revealed potentially useful deposits of asbestos, nickel, mercury, lead, zinc, bauxite, lithium, and rubies. The Afghan government in the mid-1980s was preparing to develop a number of these resources on a large scale with Soviet technical assistance. These efforts were directed primarily at the country's large iron and copper reserves. The iron ore deposits contained an estimated 1.7 billion tons of mixed hematite and magnetite, averaging 62 percent iron. These reserves, among the world's largest, arelocated at Hajji Gak, almost 4,000 meters up in the Hindu Kush, northwest of Kabul in Bamian Province. Development started in 1983, and because the Afghan authorities had put forth no plan to establish an iron and steel industry, the output appeared destined for the Soviet steel mills in Tashkent.
​

A former senior State Department official said that regular discussions between the U.S. and the Karzai government over how to best exploit the resources for potential future use were ongoing when he was privy to those discussions around 2006.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics...iracle-a-massive-information-operation/58104/

 

[Hound of UIster]

And in the long term a few people will get rich, the western mining companies will make a ton of money and the cycle will continue.

Afghanistan will simply become the Nigeria of the region.

Perhaps, but a lot of the locals will get jobs out of it, which is a good thing.

Don't count on it. If Afghanistan had more transparency, a better record of human rights and governance, this would be a blessing otherwise, it's not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

 

[Hound of UIster]

New York Times link

I knew we didn't invade Afghanistan to corner the world market on lapis lazuli!

Afghanistan is set to become the Saudi Arabia of lithium - plus it has huge deposits of iron, copper, cobalt, and gold.

The value of the reserves are a hundred times larger than the country's current GDP.

Hrmm... Or maybe this was Cheney's genius.

This is like saying Alexander Fleming set out to discover penicillin.

But as a result he did win the Nobel Prize for Penicillin and is still remembered fondly in elementary school classrooms and science history books.