Intrigue, as the New York Times popped up this morning with a story about how Afghanistan is sitting on a trillion dollars worth of mineral wealth, including massive deposits of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and lithium.
There’s a few different aspects to this story. Michael Cohen is peeved by the somewhat cynical exploitation of the story by the Pentagon, and he has a point – there’s nothing new about this haul. The US found charts detailing the country’s mineral wealth in 2004, and even put the details online in 2007, but these charts had been drawn up during the Soviet occupation of the country in the 1980s. The reason why this story is in the paper today is because the Pentagon needs a good news cycle or two. There’s may be a little bit more to it than that; it may be that the US needs a way to strongarm co-operation out of the Karzai government in Kabul. But either way, this is pretty transparent.
Afghanistan has been a rough war almost since its inception, but the last few months have been particularly bad:
First, let’s talk about Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president. Remember the chatter earlier this year about how he’d gone crazy, threatening to join the Taliban and all that? That discussion died down a little after Karzai checked all the right boxes during his May visit to Washington.
Then came the “peace jirga” — after which Karzai abruptly fired his intelligence and interior ministers, reputed to be two of the most competent members of his cabinet (technically, they resigned). The intelligence minister, Amrullah Saleh, told his side of the Friday in a jaw-dropping interview with the Times. According to Saleh, Karzai no longer believes the West can win the war and is looking to cast his lot with Pakistan and the Taliban, and an unnamed source told the paper that Karzai had suggested that the Americans had carried out a rocket attack on the peace jirga. Karzai has apparently also asked the United Nations to remove Mullah Omar from a key U.N. blacklist.
Next came revelations that Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence agency, the ISI, is still deeply involved with the Afghan Taliban (yeah, blow me over with a feather) despite heated denials to the contrary.
Meanwhile, the drive for Kandahar looks to be stalled in the face of questionable local support for Karzai’s government, the Taliban is killing local authorities left and right, and the corruption situation has apparently gotten so bad that the U.S. intelligence community is now keeping tabs on which Afghan officials are stealing what.
So the article is a piece of empty puff, right? Well, yes, actually – the US can’t develop those resources now for the same reason that it hasn’t been able to for the last 6 years, and for much the same reasons as why Russia didn’t bother in the 1980s: there’s a war, there’s no infrastructure, and the local government is so corrupt that it would have next to no real economic effect. The worst-case outcome, as advanced by Cohen, is a situation analogous to Congo or Angola – both of which are resource-rich but economically poor. The best case seems to be that Afghanistan becomes a “Saudi Arabia of lithium”, which comes from a Pentagon memo that asserts the possibility like it’s a good thing. Personally, I’d prefer it if Saudi Arabia stopped being the Saudi Arabia of oil, rather than inspiring a glut of new Saudi Arabias for the rest of the periodic table.
It’s nice to hear that Afghanistan has an economic future, if it ever gets to the point where it has a government that is capable of managing it for the good of the country as a whole. But it’s pie-in-the-sky stuff, for now; I’d be amazed if it gets to that stage in our lifetimes, and it certainly won’t get to that point while American boots are still on the ground. Meanwhile, public opinion, both at home and in Afghanistan itself, won’t shift behind the occupiers until real, tangible benefits to their presence start being felt. The US military should be focusing on doing what it has to do rather than indulging in this kind flippancy.
