The Enduring Strategic Partnership Agreement signed on May 2 (which by the way has the 2024 date in it) talks about "encouraging US private sector activity in Afghanistan," and the "desire" that the Afghan people be the beneficiaries of Afghanistan's mineral wealth. Hmm, remember this story in 2010?
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."
Wow! Talk about a game changer. The story goes on to outline Afghanistan's apparently vast underground resources, which include large copper and iron reserves as well as hitherto undiscovered reserves lithium and other rare minerals.
Read a little more carefully, though, and you realize that there's less to this scoop than meets the eye. For one thing, the findings on which the story was based are online and have been since 2007, courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey. More information is available on the Afghan mining ministry's website, including a report by the British Geological Survey (and there's more here). You can also take a look at the USGS's documentation of the airborne part of the survey here, including the full set of aerial photographs.
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But I'm (a) skeptical of that $1 trillion figure; (b) skeptical of the timing of this story, given the bad news cycle, and (c) skeptical that Afghanistan can really figure out a way to develop these resources in a useful way. It's also worth noting, as Risen does, that it will take years to get any of this stuff out of the ground, not to mention enormous capital investment.
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/06/14/say_what_afghanistan_has_1_trillion_in_untapped_mineral_resources
any correlation why the US says we have to stay until 2024?
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