The Afghan ‘mineral strike’ is just spin

This week, just as things were looking at their bleakest in Afghanistan — growing casualties and the damning report on the links between Taleban leaders and the Pakistani secret service — the Pentagon pulled a rare piece of good news out of the hat: Afghanistan, it turns out, is not only a poppy-growing paradise but also a mining El Dorado. Around $1 trillion worth of minerals has been discovered (says the US Geological Survey) and according to enthusiastic US and Afghan officials, this stunning potential could make mining the future backbone of the Afghan economy.

Well, hooray, then let’s not pull out so hastily, people have begun to say. Perhaps all those lives weren’t wasted; perhaps with the help of this newfound wealth, Kabul can secure democracy and keep the Taleban at bay.

But before we all get too excited, we should ask: is this really such an exciting discovery? Upon closer inspection, in fact, it tells us far more about the politically exhausted state of the American home front than it does about Afghanistan. It’s less a discovery than a desperate tactic: the hawks’ last roll of the dice in their bid to stop Obama pulling out.

Although much of the media on both sides of the Atlantic has taken the hawks’ bait, a little scrutiny shows there’s far less to the mineral strike than meets the eye. The US Department of Defense briefing claims that $908 billion worth of reserves of copper, iron, cobalt, gold and lithium (used to make cellphone batteries) are lying in the ground in Afghanistan, as if they’re just waiting to be exploited. But that’s not how it works. Mining is a difficult business, requiring four key conditions to succeed. Afghanistan, which has no mining tradition, fails on all four counts.

First, mining on a mass scale requires a large capital investment of at least several hundred million dollars per mine and usually many years to pass (even in stable surroundings) for the investment to turn a solid profit.