Jack & Jill Politics

hat tip-SouthernGirl2

From The NYTimes.com:

U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan
by JAMES RISEN
Published: June 13, 2010

WASHINGTON — 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.

…………………………….

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.

Sigh…

We simply can’t catch a break.

Afghanistan was a pit of hell even before this announcement.

Now, we’ll never get out of there.

Why couldn’t it have been any other country over there, including Iran.

The problem with it being Afghanistan, is that Afghanistan has never been a country.

It’s a land mass with tribes on it.

It doesn’t have an educated class, by that I mean a substantially sized educated class, so, if there was any ‘democracy’ that was established there, they could run things.

It is not an Iran, which not only has a highly educated populace within the walls of Iran at this moment, but also has a highly educated exile populace around the world. Iran, and Iraq, not only have an educated class, but they also have a solid mercantile class, folks that know have been entrepreneurs and bankers for centuries.

Afghanistan is a land mass with tribes on it. An uneducated populace, which means trouble.

Here they come – the multi-nationals, which is all they need. Reading this story just made my stomach drop, and think about a scene from the movie-Syriana: they would show these meetings of the ‘ Free Iran’ Committee, here and there, and ya know, there wasn’t a person in those meetings that looked like they could trace their ancestry to Iran.

If we went into IRAQ for OIL (the contracts for which American companies – NEVER GOT), then, let’s not be shocked, if we can’t LEAVE Afghanistan anytime soon.

Just the thoughts of a cynic this morning.