U.S. Identifies Vast Riches Of Minerals In Afghanistan

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U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan Jun 14, 2010
Poor people of Afghanistan...Does this mean that the economic invations/wars and deaths will never come to an end there? Does this mean that the Afghans will never have their own say in such matters on their soil?

WASHINGTON — The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.

While it could take many years to develop a mining industry, the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war.

“There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”

The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan’s existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the United States and other industrialized countries. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is only about $12 billion.

“This will become the backbone of the Afghan economy,” said Jalil Jumriany, an adviser to the Afghan minister of mines.

American and Afghan officials agreed to discuss the mineral discoveries at a difficult moment in the war in Afghanistan. The American-led offensive in Marja in southern Afghanistan has achieved only limited gains. Meanwhile, charges of corruption and favoritism continue to plague the Karzai government, and Mr. Karzai seems increasingly embittered toward the White House.

So the Obama administration is hungry for some positive news to come out of Afghanistan. Yet the American officials also recognize that the mineral discoveries will almost certainly have a double-edged impact.

Instead of bringing peace, the newfound mineral wealth could lead the Taliban to battle even more fiercely to regain control of the country.

The corruption that is already rampant in the Karzai government could also be amplified by the new wealth, particularly if a handful of well-connected oligarchs, some with personal ties to the president, gain control of the resources. Just last year, Afghanistan’s minister of mines was accused by American officials of accepting a $30 million bribe to award China the rights to develop its copper mine. The minister has since been replaced.

Endless fights could erupt between the central government in Kabul and provincial and tribal leaders in mineral-rich districts. Afghanistan has a national mining law, written with the help of advisers from the World Bank, but it has never faced a serious challenge.

“No one has tested that law; no one knows how it will stand up in a fight between the central government and the provinces,” observed Paul A. Brinkley, deputy undersecretary of defense for business and leader of the Pentagon team that discovered the deposits.

At the same time, American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, which could upset the United States, given its heavy investment in the region. After winning the bid for its Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, China clearly wants more, American officials said.

Another complication is that because Afghanistan has never had much heavy industry before, it has little or no history of environmental protection either. “The big question is, can this be developed in a responsible way, in a way that is environmentally and socially responsible?” Mr. Brinkley said. “No one knows how this will work.”

With virtually no mining industry or infrastructure in place today, it will take decades for Afghanistan to exploit its mineral wealth fully. “This is a country that has no mining culture,” said Jack Medlin, a geologist in the United States Geological Survey’s international affairs program. “They’ve had some small artisanal mines, but now there could be some very, very large mines that will require more than just a gold pan.”

The mineral deposits are scattered throughout the country, including in the southern and eastern regions along the border with Pakistan that have had some of the most intense combat in the American-led war against the Taliban insurgency.

The Pentagon task force has already started trying to help the Afghans set up a system to deal with mineral development. International accounting firms that have expertise in mining contracts have been hired to consult with the Afghan Ministry of Mines, and technical data is being prepared to turn over to multinational mining companies and other potential foreign investors. The Pentagon is helping Afghan officials arrange to start seeking bids on mineral rights by next fall, officials said.

“The Ministry of Mines is not ready to handle this,” Mr. Brinkley said. “We are trying to help them get ready.”

Like much of the recent history of the country, the story of the discovery of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth is one of missed opportunities and the distractions of war.

In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.

During the chaos of the 1990s, when Afghanistan was mired in civil war and later ruled by the Taliban, a small group of Afghan geologists protected the charts by taking them home, and returned them to the Geological Survey’s library only after the American invasion and the ouster of the Taliban in 2001.

“There were maps, but the development did not take place, because you had 30 to 35 years of war,” said Ahmad Hujabre, an Afghan engineer who worked for the Ministry of Mines in the 1970s.

Armed with the old Russian charts, the United States Geological Survey began a series of aerial surveys of Afghanistan’s mineral resources in 2006, using advanced gravity and magnetic measuring equipment attached to an old Navy Orion P-3 aircraft that flew over about 70 percent of the country.

The data from those flights was so promising that in 2007, the geologists returned for an even more sophisticated study, using an old British bomber equipped with instruments that offered a three-dimensional profile of mineral deposits below the earth’s surface. It was the most comprehensive geologic survey of Afghanistan ever conducted.

The handful of American geologists who pored over the new data said the results were astonishing.

But the results gathered dust for two more years, ignored by officials in both the American and Afghan governments. In 2009, a Pentagon task force that had created business development programs in Iraq was transferred to Afghanistan, and came upon the geological data. Until then, no one besides the geologists had bothered to look at the information — and no one had sought to translate the technical data to measure the potential economic value of the mineral deposits.

Soon, the Pentagon business development task force brought in teams of American mining experts to validate the survey’s findings, and then briefed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Mr. Karzai.

So far, the biggest mineral deposits discovered are of iron and copper, and the quantities are large enough to make Afghanistan a major world producer of both, United States officials said. Other finds include large deposits of niobium, a soft metal used in producing superconducting steel, rare earth elements and large gold deposits in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan.

Just this month, American geologists working with the Pentagon team have been conducting ground surveys on dry salt lakes in western Afghanistan where they believe there are large deposits of lithium. Pentagon officials said that their initial analysis at one location in Ghazni Province showed the potential for lithium deposits as large of those of Bolivia, which now has the world’s largest known lithium reserves.

For the geologists who are now scouring some of the most remote stretches of Afghanistan to complete the technical studies necessary before the international bidding process is begun, there is a growing sense that they are in the midst of one of the great discoveries of their careers.

“On the ground, it’s very, very, promising,” Mr. Medlin said. “Actually, it’s pretty amazing.”



http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world ... &ref=world

Berrin
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Re: U.S. Identifies Vast Riches Of Minerals In Afghanistan Jun 14, 2010
Opium has great medicinal properties. :lol: :lol:
Bora Bora
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Re: U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan Jun 14, 2010
They'll fabricate something else and use it as an excuse to go in there and drill for it. I have no idea why they just can't leave other countries alone.
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Re: U.S. Identifies Vast Riches Of Minerals In Afghanistan Jun 15, 2010
Bora Bora wrote:Opium has great medicinal properties. :lol: :lol:

:D you bet Bora...

The Dilemma of Russia and NATO: To Destroy or Not Destroy the Poppy Fields in Afghanistan

05.04.2010

Last week, one of the main debates in the Russia NATO Council was the poppy issue in Afghanistan. The core of the debate was the difference between the Russian and NATO approaches to tackling the poppy cultivation in the country. The Russians proposed destroying poppy fields and solving the problem by using hard measures that would definitely hamper the poppy production in 2010. Moreover, the Afghan authorities also demand a similar policy be implemented to weaken the economic instruments of the Taliban.

On the other hand, NATO did not accept this proposal due to its indirect and direct repercussions. NATO's thesis is based on the fact that eradication of the poppy fields was tried before, but this has not helped to reach a long lasting solution in fighting against the drug problem in the country. On the contrary, this process triggers another problematic mechanism that ends with pushing farmers to the ranks of Taliban. NATO's diagnosis seems to be fair, but the situation has turned into a structural problem and Russia wants to pursue a radical policy in Afghanistan. However, for a long lasting solution of the problem, hard power measures can only result in disappointments. The parties should go down to the root reasons of the problem.

Understanding the Causal Mechanism

Actually, poppy cultivation in Afghanistan is a long-term problem that has global and regional repercussions. One of the main reasons of poppy cultivation is the easily gained rent from drug trade. Unlike other agricultural products, thinking about its cost/profit balance,opium is a magical commodity, due to its non-competitive nature in the market. In the absence of a sovereign central government that can control the whole state, Afghanistan is a paradise for opium production. Moreover, the absence of a strong government means problems in terms of the domestic economy and people will lean towards finding easy ways of earning money to be able to survive under these unfavourable conditions. It should be underlined here that the situation is not better in Afghanistan after the Coalition Forces' operation in 2001. The Taliban has regained power in time, and the conditions outside of Kabul cannot be defined as stable. Especially the situation in southern provinces, which are closer to Pakistan,has a complicated character due to geographic and socio-economic dynamics in these places.

Instability in Afghanistan has negative impacts in neighbouring countries as well. The problems of refugees, terrorism, and drug trafficking are turning into (or have already turned into) structural problems in the region. This makes neighbouring states to look for new measures with their limited resources. The Central Asian countries, Pakistan and Iran are among the states that suffer from these problems at first hand. Drug trafficking in particular is a core problem that makes it easier for radical groups to get financial resources.

Source: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, World Drug Report 2009

In reference to the statistics, it can be seen that 82% of the worlds opium is cultivated in Afghanistan and almost 90% of opium is produced in the same country. Parallel to the above analysis, almost 65% of poppy cultivation is in the southern province of Helmand. However, it should be understood that poppy cultivation is not the cause of the aforementioned problems, but the result of regional and domestic dynamics. Imagine that people younger than 30 years old have had no chance to live in a stable country with a functioning government or without being under the shadows of weapons. Considering the life expectancy in the country, which is 44 years, the gravity of the picture can be better understood. The state building process should be done with this available human resource. However, the traumas of people and the problematic characteristics of the demographic structure are not presenting so many options to the policymakers in this process.

Apart from the human resources of the country, it should be emphasized that all infrastructure and superstructure has collapsed since the Soviet invasion in 1979. Another challenge for the Coalition Forces and NATO in the country is rebuilding Afghanistan. Provincial Reconstruction Teams are playing critical roles, but they have limited means to overcome this challenge. Yet, Canadians in Kandahar and Turks in Wardak are taking important steps in terms of improving the conditions of irrigation, health and education in these provinces. However, these policies are still quite far from a global approach to the solution of the problem.


Source: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, World Drug Report 2009

Choosing Between Solutions
So, what should be done in Afghanistan?This is a million dollar question. There is no crystal clear answer. However, what should be eschewed while implementing policies is easier to formulate. First of all, there is a governability problem in the country. It is not something that can be solved overnight. Yet, services provided by international NGOs are not helping to create a strong state profile in Afghanistan. In a modern state, people who get services from their own state bodies would respect state authority. However, this is not the case in Afghanistan. Second, training Afghan security forces and letting them take over the responsibility of preserving stability in the country has taken so much time that what Afghan people see in the streets are the uniforms of a foreign country not their own soldiers or polices. Third, disproportionate force used during military operations and civilian casualties feed enmity among the Afghan people against the Coalition Forces. This also creates a basis for enmity myths to be reproduced that would cause a long-term problem of victimization in the society, which also serves the interests of the terrorist groups.

Under these assumptions, policies of eradicating poppy fields without a global policy that includes social and economic dimensions will definitely fall short of a long-term solution. As we can recall, Afghanistan's share in poppy growth was at its lowest level in 2001 during the Taliban's reign. In 2001, Taliban put a ban on poppy cultivation and pursued a similar approach to what Russia is proposing today. Since NATO's Afghanistan operation, Afghanistan's share in global production has increased dramatically and, in 2008, reached its highest level in 15 years. Thus, eradicating poppy fields will certainly be effective in the short run, but will definitely create direct and indirect results. Recent reports show that there are signs of a decrease in poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. On the other hand, 65% of the cultivation is concentrated in Helmand province. This underlines the necessity of local and nationwide policies to be implemented in Afghanistan. However, security is still the chief problem, but without cutting the resources of terrorists, and providing new sources to Afghan people, it is not possible to bring stability. In a country like Afghanistan, where development depends on agriculture, policies should be pursued in this context. Irrigation, training of farmers and creating a functioning market, which is not based on the principles of the free market at least for a couple of years, are important. Subsidy policies should be implemented in the medium term to make cultivating commodities other than poppy more attractive, but this cannot be done within the mechanisms of a free market. This is why state should regulate the market and international community can play the role of auditor to minimize corruption.

It is not easy to ignore Russian concerns. Afghanistan is the starting point for drug trafficking that begins from this country and then reaches to Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In other words, Afghanistan is the main supplier for the opiate market in the West. Moreover, it has negative impacts in Central Asia as well. However, the opium issue is not the main cause of instability in Afghanistan, it is just a result. Thus, policies should be developed with this fact in mind.


Hasan Selim Ozertem
Centre for Eurasian Studies - Researcher

http://www.usak.org.tr/EN/makale.asp?id=1429
Berrin
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