The Pentagon is highlighting a new U.S. Geological Survey estimate that Afghanistan may be sitting on a trillion dollars’ worth of mineral wealth, the New York Times reports.



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

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

The paper goes on to quote Centcom commander Gen. David Petraeus: “There is stunning potential here. There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”

But veteran Afghan hands say the “discovery” of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth is hardly new. And some detect an echo of Petraeus’ effort to “put a little more time on the Washington clock” for the Afghanistan surge as he once described his public relations strategy to buy time in the U.S. for the Iraq surge. The Times report itself notes the Pentagon agreed to discuss the minerals discovery as a rare good news story amid many more disturbing reports coming from Afghanistan.



“The ‘discovery’ of Afghanistan’s minerals will sound pretty silly to old timers,” one retired former senior U.S. official based in Afghanistan writes. “When I was living in Kabul in the early 1970’s the [U.S. government], the Russians, the World Bank, the UN and others were all highly focused on the wide range of Afghan mineral deposits. Cheap ways of moving the ore to ocean ports has always been the limiting factor.”

“In my day we did a joint USG/Iranian study of a potential rail line from Afghanistan to several of the Iranian rail hubs," he continued. "This was predicated on mineral exploitation.”

“In the early 70's the USG had an old FDR New-Deal planner/economist - Bob Nathan - working with the Afghan Ministry of Plans to work out a fifty year mineral exploitation program,” the former official said. “When the Russians came in they picked up Bob's plans and extended them. So this is anything but a ‘new discovery.’” (He provides this bibliography, circa 1980, on Afghan mineral assessments.)

Indeed, the Times report notes that the latest U.S. Geological Survey drew from those earlier Russian geological surveys. “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.”

But other Washington Afghanistan watchers note that while the discovery may not be wholly new, it still presents an opportunity for Afghanistan's economic future, including how it might fund the Afghanistan security forces that NATO is currently trying to stand up and train. It is however an opportunity, they acknowledge, shadowed by the potential risks that have befallen other resource-rich countries as well as by all the logistical, economic and infrastructure complications of moving ore.

Yes, there's probably an effort to get some good news out, one observer who declined to be quoted said. Does that mean it's not important? No.

But another Washington Afghanistan hand, who said the U.S. Geological Survey findings were made known in Washington several months ago including by former Afghan finance minister Ashraf Ghani, said it could mean "Afghanistan looks more like Congo."

"It makes security much less likely," he said. "I am not at all the least bit optimistic that the Afghan people themselves will see the benefit of this."

"You can't strike a deal that makes everybody happy because the Chinese want their piece, the Russians want their piece, western companies too," he continued. "If there's something to get out of it, all the regional players will be coming in for a whole variety of reasons that can't all be squared."

He read the minerals story as "the administration really needs something to staunch the feeling that 'let's just get the hell out,'" including after an earlier New York Times report this weekend alleged that Afghan President Hamid Karzai doubts NATO forces can defeat the Taliban. The portrayal in the report was vigorously denied by UN Ambassador Susan Rice on the Sunday news shows.

Some including Ghani have been advocating the creation of a trust fund to distribute the income derived from Afghanistan's natural resources to benefit the population, the latter expert said.

UPDATE: Ghani, reached by POLITICO in Afghanistan Monday, said he had in fact commissioned the assessment of Afghanistan's mineral wealth when he served as Afghanistan's finance minister (and been criticized at the time for wasting money on the survey), and that he'd been expecting the report to come out for a couple months.

"As to why it came out today and not a week or before or week after, I cannot explain," Ghani said. "You have to ask" the New York Times reporter.

As to the implications of the findings, Ghani said Afghanistan has come to a critical juncture. "Either we become Congo, or we become Botswana or Chile. If we don’t get governance of the sectors right, [Afghanistan] will become a bastion of instability, corruption and criminality."



"On the other hand, it's a game changer: for the first time in our history we have the possibility of domestic resources ... to to be able to afford both security ... but more significantly to be able to provide substantial services to the population," he said.

He acknowledged that recent indicators are not hopeful that the Afghan population will benefit from its natural wealth.

"The question is very much valid and we will have to succeed against all odds," Ghani said.

He said technology and road and infrastructure improvements throughout Central Asia had made extracting and transporting Afghanistan's mineral worth more economically feasible than back in the 1970s and 80s. And he noted sadly that Afghanistan's very good former Minister of Mines Juma Mohammad Mohammadi, like himself a former World Bank official, was killed in a plane crash in 2003 off the coast of Karachi, Pakistan when he was attempting to survey one site.

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