The New York Times recently printed an article [on Afghanistan] [0] reporting that a trillion dollars’ worth of likely lithium ores and other mineral resources have been found there, during geological surveys in 2006 [and 2007] [1], [results of which are online] [2], although [other claims exist that say that Afghanistan's mineral wealth has been known or suspected for decades] [3].
> 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. > > … > > So far, the biggest mineral deposits discovered are of iron and > copper, and the quantities are large enough to make Afghanistan a > major world producer of both, United States officials said. Other > finds include large deposits of niobium, a soft metal used in > producing superconducting steel, rare earth elements and large gold > deposits in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan. This is likely to cause a lot of trouble for the Afghans. Until now, the rest of the world mostly hasn’t cared about Afghanistan except as a trade route. Now, they’re living on land that every industrial power in the world will want to extract wealth from, on the most favorable possible terms, with as little expense spared on preserving the nearby environment as possible. This is likely to result in the following: * yet more wars over Afghanistan, but with an order of magnitude greater expense spent on killing people to gain control of it; * at least a decade, and quite possibly the remaining part of biological human history, during which the development of Afghan industry is suppressed alternately by war and by not being able to manufacture anything at low enough cost to be salable internationally, due to upwards pressure on their living expenses from the mining; * massive pollution and contamination from poorly-regulated mining operations; * massive unemployment, because the mining and refining operations will start out mostly automated and will proceed to being fully automated by 2035. Mining companies will have no constraint forcing them to share their wealth with the country as a whole, because they will not need to hire lots of workers; they need only to spend enough on fighters to protect their operations from raiding. This is not going to be good news for Afghans. What could improve the situation? The Afghans have been fighting foreign occupiers on and off for centuries, and it hasn’t given them good life expectancies or good government, although they’ve usually managed to preserve collective freedom from colonialism — often at the cost of individual freedom. I imagine they’ll keep on trying to fight off colonialism with AK-47s and RPGs and whatever other weapons they can get, and I imagine that that will continue to make day-to-day life there dangerous and unfree. But their chances of continuing to succeed are a lot lower now. So I don’t see that as a path that’s going to improve matters. If the rest of the world were less willing to pay for these resources, that would diminish the danger. That’s unlikely to be achieved by coordinated action. It’s very likely that consumers in developed countries will continue to not care about the plight of the Afghans, exactly as they have done for the past several centuries. Even if they did care, you can’t tell where your iron, copper, cobalt, gold, niobium, and lithium come from — they can easily be laundered through other countries — and much of their usage is industrial rather than individual in nature. However, development of alternative materials (e.g. nanotubes may diminish the demand for iron), alternative sources for these same materials (e.g. asteroid mining), or a collapse of the developed-world economy could have this effect. If somehow killing people became ineffective or unnecessary as a way of gaining access to the mining areas, that could reduce the risk of mining interests doing so, assuming they noticed the change. My usual favored cure for violence, i.e. decentralization, may not be effective here. Mineral deposits are fairly centralized by their nature. Small centralized groups can fully exploit them. The small groups may find that threatening or killing people is less effective at neutralizing their opposition than in a more centralized state, but it’s been fairly ineffective in Afghanistan for centuries, and that hasn’t stopped it. Low-cost equipment for detecting pollution (e.g. Jeremijenko’s dogs) could help in curtailing the worst of the environmental damage, by preventing pollution from going undetected. It’s very likely that what actually happens will be much weirder than anything I’ve suggested above. [0]: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html?pagewanted=all "U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan, by James Risen, 2010-06-13" [1]: http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1819 "USGS press release: “Significant Potential for Undiscovered Resources in Afghanistan”, 2007-11-13" [2]: http://afghanistan.cr.usgs.gov/ "Online documents and data series from the USGS work in Afghanistan" [3]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1430125 "Discussion of ‘No, The U.S. Didn’t Just ‘Discover’ a $1 Trillion Afghan Motherlode’" -- To unsubscribe: http://lists.canonical.org/mailman/listinfo/kragen-tol
