$1Trillion of untapped minerals in Afghanistan

[Fire_Moose]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world ... erals.html

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,â€

[theCryptofishist]

I'm a little confused about the concept of an "artisanal mine."
Oh well.
May this discovery bring prosperity and happiness to the Afgani, rather than poisen and further war.

Beyond that, I don't know what to say.

[DVD Burner]

Hey, I posted this hours ago in the Politics thread.

Oh wait, that's right, no one reads that thread anymore.

[geekster]

These have been known for years. The USGS even has had the aerial photography online for years.

The problem is that there are no rail lines and no roads to speak of in Afghanistan. You could be sitting (literally) on a gold mine and have no way of getting it out or sending it anywhere.

I question the timing of this "story" that everyone has known about for about the past 5 years.

[Fire_Moose]

Hey, I posted this hours ago in the Politics thread.

Oh wait, that's right, no one reads that thread anymore.

Don't think it's so much that forum as it is yer threads

[Ugly Dougly]

Get them off the opium growing habit, anyway.

[ygmir]

Get them off the opium growing habit, anyway.

I would doubt that.
People still like the big, easy money of the drug trade...........
Mining is hard work.

[DVD Burner]

Ok, that's all and all good with the wishful thinking and all but lets face facts here folks, that place is gonna get rapped just like Africa, Peru and all other places the U.S. and EU has done over the centuries.

Besides, why stop wars when you can make so much money from them?

[Fire_Moose]

Besides, why stop wars when you can make so much money from them?

Yerp...


Let's give up control of Afghanistan to China and then we call us even?

[DVD Burner]

Hey I forgot about China.

Bet that's what the Russians knew all along also.

I think Geekster may be off by a few years on who knew about the minerals and all.

[Ugly Dougly]

Those folks in Afghanistan need to become good and spoiled. Get them some strip malls and fast-food joints, get them all high-paying jobs, where would their killer instinct be then?

[geekster]

Yes, the Russians knew. But so did the USGS.

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/201 ... _resources

And if you read the original NY Times story:

In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.

So there is nothing really new here. The geology is right for there to be abundant mineral deposits and people have known for ages that there are minerals there.

The problem is that there is none of the infrastructure needed to exploit it. Only now is the FIRST railroad being built to Uzbekistan. A route through Tajikistan to China is likely to be delayed by the Tajik/Uzbek clashes.

Afghanistan is the second least developed country on the planet. So ... what are you going to use to open the mine with? Can you get the equipment there on the back of a donkey? No, you need a road that can bear heavy industrial traffic. What do you build a road with? Afghanistan has no oil to speak of, you must use concrete. Where do you get concrete in Afghanistan? You haul cement over Khyber pass on the back of a donkey or in smallish trucks in bags. You can't make cement in Afghanistan because that requires electricity for kilns. There is no electricity that amounts to anything in Afghanistan and what they have is mostly imported. There is a dam at Kandahar that could be brought online and there was a big deal about getting a new turbine there a few years ago but it turned out that A: the turbine they brought in needs a lot of work before it can be turned up and B: nobody wants to go there and work on it so it is not being actively worked on.

Sure, there is a lot of mineral wealth there but no way to get to it and no way to get it out of Afghanistan. Only when China takes an active interest will anything be done there on a major scale. I believe China wants to build both a railroad and a power plant but those efforts may be stalled by instability in surrounding countries.

What would Genghis do?

[DVD Burner]

Well one thing is definitely for sure, Halliburton has got the equipment to do whatever you want.

Actually I am still amazed the kind of machines they own and have an abundance of.

[geekster]

Haliburton and Bechtel and probably the only Western companies that could do it but still, every drop of fuel and every spoonful of cement would need to be imported. The only viable way for this to actually be done is for China to open a route through the Wakhan corridor (old Silk Road) which has been talked about but nothing serious has been proposed as the route is difficult.

Events in Tajikistan might cause folks to have a second look at a Wakhan route, though.

CREC (China Railroad Engineering Corp) could do it and so could (Korean) Samsung Heavy Industries. As China would be the primary market for these materials (no matter where they are exported to initially, the material would likely end up in China anyway), it would make sense that the Chinese will exploit that resource.

I believe one of the reasons for this sudden hype is to send a message to China ... get on board with us and you have cheap source of raw materials right on your border.

[DVD Burner]

Forgot about Bechtel also. These guys usually screw things up tho. They have a history of doing that.


Speaking of China,
Something you may be interested in: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 6349997790#

It's about Coltan the metal used in all cell phones.

[geekster]

Well, keep in mind that you don't hear about projects that go smoothly, only the ones that screw up. Had BP listened to Haliburton, for instance, there wouldn't be an oil gusher on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. Haliburton told them not to flush that mud, BP went "engineer shopping" and found someone else internally who would sign off on it. All because that drilling rig was due to leave the next morning and it would cost BP a fortune to keep it there while a new production plug was cemented in place. How much is that decision costing them now?

Those firms have been building huge projects for decades. Also, they do the building but they don't come up with the idea for them. Someone else has to come to them and hire them to do something. I find it interesting that a country will come up with an idea, build something, it doesn't work as expected, and then try to blame the contractor. Politicians are generally pretty good at trying to find other people to blame for shit.

[DVD Burner]

yeah maybe, but then again, just about all of these guys have horrendous records that span a few decades now.

And they are always involved in some kinda "New World Order" of things.

Then they always fuck up and rip people off in the process.

[flatlander13]

Let’s bomb the fuck out of them and steal all their ship while their dead………..oops, looks like we are already doing that ………..never mind.

[DVD Burner]

Steal all there ship while their dead?

Ok folks, this is not one of my socks.

[Thecatman]

Shame there is'nt any oil












Since we can't drill for our own

[Zona]

You just have to love that GPR our pentagon guys use, it finds all the minerals and the bad guys from the comfort of home.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar

[DVD Burner]

Good one Zona.

[teardropper]

And I thought it was just the oil pipeline Haliburton wanted. Looks like they were playing big picture...

[DVD Burner]

Yeah, I think they still want the pipeline but as it is, things aint workin out like they expected so far....

They are at the Bilderberg 2010 convention scratchin their heads tryin to figure out just what went wrong and what their next fuckup......I mean next move is.

[Kinetik V]

Oh lucky us, now we'll have troops there forever or at least until we plunder those resources to recoup our costs of this war.

[DVD Burner]

Uh.....K.? That is not the plan.

The plan is to send the American dollar into a stooper to allow the Euro and the Amero become the the global denominations.

How is it you do not know this?

[DVD Burner]

This just came out in Wired today:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/06 ... otherlode/

Turns out there are high amounts of coltan there also.

That makes a huge difference.

[geekster]

Oh lucky us, now we'll have troops there forever or at least until we plunder those resources to recoup our costs of this war

Right, because we have such a history of plundering such resources such as in Iraq where not a single US company has been issued an oil contract.

It is most likely that China will plunder those resources and I believe we are attempting to encourage that. The reason is that if Chinese citizens are placed at risk, China won't have a kid gloves approach.

See, the US has a history of killing more people with "kindness" than we do with bullets. We could have put an end to a lot of the nonsense in Afghanistan long ago with a lot less casualties on both sides if we weren't so "nice". China would likely do so.

For example, if residents of a particular village were to blow up a road or inflict casualties on the people of another village, you tell the population that if it happens again, you will remove the town from the surface of the planet. If they do it again, you scrape the mud huts off the ground, load them into dump trucks and deposit the village in a canyon someplace. Harsh? Yup. But you probably only have to do it once or twice. The next time troublemakers enter a town and get big ideas to attack people, the townsfolk won't put up with it. If they do, they find the number of villages and marketplaces declining and their tribe begins to lose economic clout in the region.

Instead, we catch a few people, put them in jail for a while, engage in combat skirmishes for decades, and end up killing a lot of people on both sides and spending huge amounts of money on what amounts to nothing and traumatizing an entire young generation for years. A dozen tanks with bulldozer blades could have eliminated the problem 5 years ago and not killed anyone. The people would learn that blowing things up is stupid and you loose your entire village if you do and you stop tolerating the people that cause your villages to be razed.

We are destroying them with "restraint".

[cowboyangel]

So, we're "nice" then you recommend we wipe villages off the map? Did I read that right? I guess you're with Joe Barton. Now we need a nuke disaster to wake you up too I suppose.

[DVD Burner]

Only 2 places in the world I know of these days that have nukes and can possibly make that mistake.


They make mistakes all the time.

Bad ones that are tough to get out of.

Seriously bad results!