Posted on 06/16/2010 11:42:51 AM PDT by nickcarraway
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Imagine the number of armed security forces required to keep the terrorists away from the mines.
This is old news (known for many years). See this thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2534375/posts
But the Afghan constitution, which was written in a smoke filled room in Germany in December of 2001, makes all oil and minerals the property of all the people. That communist clause precluding private property in oil and minerals will always retard or prevent the development of a viable oil and mineral sector.
If it wasn’t for the religion of barbarianism they might of found and ‘exploited’ the lands years ago.
Call me cynical, but mining in an area filled with people willing to blow themselves up for... well, nothing really doesn’t seem like an optimistic endeavor. Good news is there are plenty of folks used to working with explosives in the area.
I doubt the Army or any agency of the US government has any notion of either how much is there, or if it is commercially or politically recoverable. There are reasons diamond mines are built out in the middle of nowhere, in Canada, above the Arctic Circle, and not in Afghanistan. I’m sure we all can guess a few good reasons why.
This should help finance even more jihadi terrorism!
And we’re preparing to abandon Afghanistan. Slick move.
Yeah but the miners that may want to blow themselves up won’t be offered the benefit of health insurance.
Lithium huh? Bi-polar libs will be happy.
They could make more selling the organs of the school children they kill.
Too bad Obama doesn’t have the nads to confiscate ownership of the mineral rights as punishment for their harboring of AQ.
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