Monday, June 14, 2010
News Untold Mineral Riches Discovered in Afghanistan, Which Can Only End Well
Posted by Mark Asch on Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 12:54 PM
- Barack Obama and Hamid Karzai discuss Afghanistan's newly discovered mineral wealth.
If this discovery seems like a major boon for a hard-luck country, consider, as the Times does, that Afghanistan is a country with no mining infrastructure or history of environmental protection, engaged in a war with the Taliban, and run from within a compound by a paranoid, ineffectual, erratic president with family ties to the international drug trade, and whose administration is completely corrupt when it manages to not be bossed around by brutally feuding tribal warlords. When Cyndi Lauper said "Money changes everything," she didn't meant that that was necessarily a good thing.
American geologists conducted a deep survey of the country's reserves in the early part of last decade, but neither American nor Afghan officials moved to respond to the new information until last year, because the Bush administration was a top to bottom shitshow the extent to which likely won't be fully understood for decades.
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