In the long history of American conflict overseas, there is no question that natural resources have played a considerable part. And if the struggle in Afghanistan has begun to seem nonsensical, perhaps this can help put it into context.
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.
Now, I am not arguing that we went into Afghanistan to exploit their natural resources. But we may very well stay there because of them. The truth is that we didn’t know that they had any natural resources beyond poppy, and this discovery is recent.
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.
My first impression on learning this news is positive. Afghanistan is so poor and so decrepit and so insecure that they could never attract the foreign investment or aid needed to become functional and prosperous. But now that we know that they are sitting on untold wealth, they have a domestic source of revenue that can truly transform the country. Yet, my second impression is that this spells trouble. Afghanistan will be the next Deadwood.
They don’t have the infrastructure to set up complicated mining operations with the assistance of investment bankers and foreign capital. They have no mining industry to speak of, and no regulators. They have no idea how to protect the environment. They can learn those things fairly quickly, as Saudi Arabia did in the oil industry. But they’re starting from zero.
And we should remember that our very own Minerals Management Service is probably the most corrupt agency in our entire government. How much worse will Karzai’s agency be? And how will China and the US clash over access to these resources?
There is a lot to be concerned about, but these resources give Afghanistan a chance that no one thought they had. While this could spur more fighting among Afghans, the truth is that this wealth will remain dormant until the factions stop fighting long enough to attract the foreign investment and expertise needed to extract it.
A certain element will call this imperialism. It will involve foreign powers, corruption, kickbacks, and political maneuvering, but it could also be the one thing that can convince different Afghan factions to stop fighting each other. If they keep fighting, no one will invest.
Let Afghanistan become the indispensable source of laptop batteries. That is so much more hopeful than the source of heroin.
