This planet of ours can dominate the news and change our history with ease. Mother earth sustains us but she does more. Creation myths dwell on our relationship with her. Our food and water are her gift to us. When she has a bout of "sweating" (hurricanes and tornadoes) in hot weather it often disrupts our lives and even kills some of us. When she stretches too hard the surface quakes and we have disaster. More than that she has always had hidden secrets. Her clothing is jeweled in some very secret ways. When we find these hidden treasures our lives change in a big way. So now it is minerals in Afghanistan. U.S. Identifies Vast Mineral Riches in Afghanistan. But then we have:Afghan mineral wealth raises host of questions. Some historical perspective is useful here. Read on below to put this all in perspective.
Why were we so vitally interested in southeast Asia? Why were the French? Here's but one of many many sources that puts that all into geopolitical and economic perspective:The right side won the Vietnam War. Don't let the title throw you. It is not the point here anyway. The point is that we were involved there for a long time and the reasons were clear until the Kennedy Administration talked around them very cleverly. For example:
The US interest in Indochina — Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos — began and ended with greed, not noble ideals, although of course noble ideals were used whenever possible to conceal the real motives.
The 1940 Japanese occupation of Indochina alerted Washington "to the region's importance as a producer of foodstuffs and raw materials and as a key strategic point near the major shipping routes of Asia", Christopher O'Sullivan, professor of history at the University of San Francisco, noted in his 2003 book Sumner Welles, Postwar Planning, and the Quest for a New World Order, 1937-1943.
After 1945, Washington backed French imperialism's attempt to restore its colonial rule in Indochina, providing an increasing amount of funding and other support during the 1946-54 French war against Vietnam.
Not surprisingly, the US public began to wonder why the US was involved there. The US elite tried to explain, sometimes with a candour that is seldom encountered today. For example, in February 1950 the New York Times stated: "Indo-China is a prize worth a large gamble. In the north are exportable tin, tungsten, manganese, coal, lumber and rice, rubber, tea, pepper, and hides. Even before World War II, Indo-China yielded dividends estimated at $300 million a year."
A year later, a State Department adviser observed, "We have only partially exploited South-East Asia's resources. Nevertheless, South-East Asia supplied 90% of the world's crude rubber, 60% of its tin and 80% of its copra and coconut oil. It has sizable quantities of sugar, tea, coffee, tobacco, sisal, fruits, spices, natural resins and gums, petroleum, iron ore and bauxite."
Control over resources
President Dwight Eisenhower told a conference of US state governors on August 4, 1953 that "when the United States votes $400 million to help that war, we are not voting for a giveaway program. We are voting for the cheapest way that we can to prevent the occurrence of something that would be of the most terrible significance for the United States of America — our security, our power and ability to get certain things we need from the riches of the Indo-Chinese territory, and from southeast Asia."
Yes folks. During the anti-war protests we passed out tons of literature trying to get people to come out of the trance JFK and LBJ's rhetoric had put them in. We were in it for "stuff". The stuff was going to make a very few rich people even richer. Our slogan:
War is good business....invest your son
had more than the obvious meaning. So here we are again. Just as support for the rotten war is waning we have a "gold rush" or its equivalent.
The U.S. military has discovered "nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits" in Afghanistan, the New York Times' James Risen reports in a Monday front-page story — a development that could "alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself." General David Petreaus said the realization offered "stunning potential" to change the dynamic in that country.
The story has an Indiana Jones aspect: Afghan geologists protected decades-old Soviet geological surveys showing the routes to billions of dollars worth of copper, lithium, iron and gold reserves — surveys that the U.S. military recently revived in a find that could upend the war's current dynamic.
Yes folks, that's what it is all about. Forget finding those nasty terrorists. We have really been cleaning up that mess haven't we?
But, as Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall, Foreign Policy's Blake Hounshell and others have pointed out, the story raises as many questions as it answers. Afghanistan has long been known as mineral-rich country. More than a year ago, McClatchy Newspapers reported that Afghanistan's Aynak copper mine, which is currently being developed by China, is the planet's second-largest copper deposit. The McClatchy piece also noted that "the region is thought to hold some of the world's last major untapped deposits of iron, copper, gold, uranium, precious gems and other raw materials."
The Times' Risen notes that the data on which the new trillion-dollar assessment is based were collected during a 2007 survey. Last year the Pentagon conducted a study to "translate the technical data to measure the potential economic value of the mineral deposits," he reports, and came up with $1 trillion. And the Associated Press notes that just last month at a U.S. Institute of Peace event, Afghan President Hamid Karzai estimated his country's mineral wealth could total as much as $3 trillion.
So why is this information coming out now?
Good question I'd say! Why is it being asked like such a thing has never happened before? There's another good question. The really central question I have is "When will we ever learn?" or in other words "Where have all the flowers gone?"