The Afghan ‘mineral strike’ is just spin

Wednesday, 16th June 2010

John C. Hulsman and Jaakko Kooroshy explain that what looks like good news in Afghanistan is in fact just part of a propaganda war between Obama and Petraeus

And even if Afghanistan does successfully develop its vast mineral wealth (unlike, say, the vastly endowed and chronically screwed-up Democratic Republic of Congo), there’s no reason to think this would be to the West’s advantage, or even necessarily to that of ordinary Afghans.

Certainly (we sincerely hope) the Pentagon knows all this. But if so, why have General Petraeus and the Pentagon made so much effort to talk up these discoveries? And why have they decided to release the good news at this precise moment? The Afghan ‘mineral strike’ can only truly be understood as a card played in a game of increasingly high-stakes poker. It’s the hawks in the Pentagon against the war sceptics surrounding President Obama, and we’re heading for the final hand.

The correct historical analogy is with JFK in 1963. Then, as now, a young Democrat President, with his mind on the coming elections, challenged by major domestic initiatives (for the Kennedys it was civil rights, for Obama the Great Recession), increasingly questioned the merits of an unpopular and costly war. Both Kennedy then and Obama now diagnosed their generals with ‘end-state-itis’, a desperate blind desire to finish the nation-building job, whatever the strategic and domestic cost.

And indeed, in a haunting echo of those long-gone Vietnam days, it is an open secret that Generals Petraeus and McChrystal think they will need more time than the President has currently given them to turn Afghanistan around, and are using whatever means they can to maintain the military presence. Beneath all this, a huge political storm is brewing as signs of any success at all in Afghanistan are few and far between. The mineral gambit is a desperate closing salvo designed to convince a war-weary President and public that there is something worth fighting for in Afghanistan; that there is a viable economic basis for the western-led nation-building exercise in the country.

It’s a blow in a much bigger battle too — one between the warring forces which hope to define the very parameters of American international action in the emerging multi-polar era.

John Hulsman is the senior research fellow at the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (www.hcss.nl). Jaakko Kooroshy is a policy analyst at the Hague Centre, specialising in the politics of resource scarcity.

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David Bouvier

June 17th, 2010 10:07am Report this comment

I think the sub-editor should have put on the headline "West insufficiently totalitarian and brutal to development Afghan mining; Chinese involvement seems likely. Liberty and democracy unlikely to benefit.""

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