I listened to said NPR programme and the guy speculated the resources might have been known all along, but only now did the (high) price of these minerals and the (low) cost of their extraction make them more attractive.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
Regardless of the political motivations that sparked the announcement, I was excited to hear about it.
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.
I don't think it's fair to say that "everybody else" ignored Afghanistan until 2001. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was one of the more important events of the Cold War and was widely watched by the world.
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...
> 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.
How about educating the population, improving the infrastructure and so on? Lots of places without any real natural resources seem to do fine.
> 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.
Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Luxembourg, Mallorca, and so on.
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.
They had great military strength, grounded in their technological edge, despite being poorer in natural resources than India and the Congo.
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.
Are you extrapolating that the key was not the technological edge, but strong central government? I'm not persuaded.
(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.
Korea as a whole was a nation for over two thousand years; 99% of the population on the peninsula is of Korean ethnicity.
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?
Even if the profits exist, "Who will be profiting" is a good question. Here are some points
(1) Afghanistan's chunk of revenue from reserves will almost all come from Loyalties. They don't have engineers to design mines, no capital equipment to sell, no skilled labour, etc. At best, there will be a slight trickle of money to those serving food and cleaning at camps.
(2) Loyalty revenue, in a country as corrupt as Afghanistan, is not going to go the people - at best a small slice might be used to build some infrastructure
(3) All this foreign investment in the Country will lead to huge inflation which will make housing/food/etc even less affordable to the average afghani.
Source: I've lived-in and worked on mining projects in the developing world and saw all this stuff happen first hand.
I guess what I don't understand is why thought this was good news. Look around the world at countries whose economies depend on non-labor-intensive natural resource extraction. Saudi Arabia, Russia, etc. These resources form a natural monopoly and quickly become the subject of political power.
I believe the truth is a bit different. Resources are irrelevant. What's relevant is local governance and culture, that'll make a bigger difference to individual success or suffering than having or not having resources.
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.
Folks, let's finally bury this news as a PR-gag launched by Pentagon (or some other US government agency) spin-doctors. Why would they do it? People in western countries are tired of the war in Afghanistan. There's no real progress despite big plans of the western nations for this year alone. And until June 2010 western military forces have had more losses than in first three years of engagement there. So, because no one believes in the myths of "bringing freedom and democracy" and "building schools and civil society" anymore , we need a new reason to stay there: Resources! I'm not denying that they don't exist. But...
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.
The wired article is interesting, and offers some perspective. But personally, the mineral news was news to me, and helps me understand a little more about what is at stake.
New or not, this story in the NYTimes at least brought an old perspective to the new generation. Lot more people (due to Lithium take of the story) is now aware of the potential of Afghanistan, irrespective of the conspiracy theories etc.
I'm still not sure it will have an effect. Those for whom lithium mining represents a commercial possibility almost certainly already new about it from before - so what stopped investment then?
I don't buy the concept that this fixes more problems than it causes.
NYT headline is an extremely powerful tool. It puts things into a spotlight. Why? There could be various reasons, to shift attention from an oil spill, for example. =)
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.
I don't think you can argue, as the article kind of does via its sources, that these "discoveries" are of questionable profitability due to the infrastructure and security investment that will be required AND they were the lucrative reason we went to war in the first place.
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.
