The U.S. military has discovered "nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits" in Afghanistan, the New York Times' James Risen reports in a Monday front-page story — a development that could "alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself." General David Petreaus said the realization offered "stunning potential" to change the dynamic in that country.
The story has an Indiana Jones aspect: Afghan geologists protected decades-old Soviet geological surveys showing the routes to billions of dollars worth of copper, lithium, iron and gold reserves — surveys that the U.S. military recently revived in a find that could upend the war's current dynamic.
But, as Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall, Foreign Policy's Blake Hounshell and others have pointed out, the story raises as many questions as it answers. Afghanistan has long been known as mineral-rich country. More than a year ago, McClatchy Newspapers reported that Afghanistan's Aynak copper mine, which is currently being developed by China, is the planet's second-largest copper deposit. The McClatchy piece also noted that "the region is thought to hold some of the world's last major untapped deposits of iron, copper, gold, uranium, precious gems and other raw materials."
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.
Of course, it would be easy for insurgents to disrupt the extraction of those minerals, and Afghanistan's Mines Ministry has a reputation as the most corrupt backwater of an extremely corrupt national bureaucracy. In January, the country suspended the granting of new mining concessions in a bid to stamp out corruption. So it's very much an open question how that mineral wealth would eventually get translated into actual revenue and jobs.
The story also raises the question of why the U.S. Geological Survey and the Pentagon are spending resources to map Afghanistan's mineral wealth. The benefits are obvious, but why weren't private developers, who traditionally don't let wars and political instability get in the way of mining operations, already onto this trillion-dollar windfall?
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.
