Game-changer in Afghanistan??

[Elok]

That lake would be greatly improved by a little industrial runoff.

[C0ckney]

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/...eral_resources

yep. there might not be any tangible progress, the taliban might be spreading and gaining footholds everywhere, the government might be so corrupt and inept that it would collapse in about 5 minutes without massive international military and financial support, the reconstruction might be moving at a glacial pace, after 9 years and countless billions, and a political solution might look as far away as ever, but if we all just keep believing and hold firm, then success is just around the corner!

[Wezil]

Where do you think Karzai will ultimately reside (if he isn't killed of course)?

I'm guessing UK.

[C0ckney]

possibly, but he may prefer somewhere warmer, maybe dubai.

[Wezil]

I suspect the US is out.

[C0ckney]

i think you may be right.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

It all depends on the security and observance of rule of law. Cart before the horse and all that

Why $1 Trillion May Thwart Afghanistan Dreams: Amity Shlaes
Commentary by Amity Shlaes


June 15 (Bloomberg) -- Now those tribes really have something to fight over. In case you haven’t heard the mind-blowing news, impoverished Afghanistan has increased its potential net worth by a factor of 83 overnight.

Afghan mining experts may view the discovery of $1 trillion in natural resources as a new “backbone” for their economy, as one labeled it. But Afghanistan already fights over resources such as poppy plants.

The new bounty might escalate the already troubling conflict there into a global conflagration involving every meaningful power. It isn’t hard to imagine Afghanistan’s tribes, the Taliban, and, say, U.S. oil companies, President Vladimir Putin and the cash-rich Chinese all jumping in.

The research about resource wealth in the post-World War II period seems to confirm likelihood of an infelicitous outcome. The same studies, though, also define both a principle and a country that offer hope for Afghanistan. The principle is property rights, and the country is Botswana.

But first, the gloomy record. In case after case, evidence suggests that the presence of natural resource wealth in a country isn’t a blessing but a curse, fostering political instability and, paradoxically, slowing economic growth.

Russia’s revenue from oil gave Putin the power he needed to take the country half way back to Stalinism. Zimbabwe’s farmland, platinum, gold, coal and cotton enabled Robert Mugabe to tyrannize that land for decades. In Nigeria, the impact of $1.6 trillion in oil cash over time has been pollution and poverty along with the black-hooded MEND, the creepy guerrilla group that patrols the Niger River delta, kidnapping and sabotaging.

Iron and Maoists

Diamonds buried within its hills didn’t exactly bring peaceful prosperity to Sierra Leone in the 1990s, as we saw in the 2006 film “Blood Diamond.” Even in India, one of the globe’s significant success stories, a nasty battle involving iron ore is strengthening Maoist Naxalites and destabilizing the state of Chhattisgarh.

Formal studies convey the same bleak story. Oil wealth makes countries less friendly to entrepreneurs and less hospitable to the U.S, my colleague Gaurav Tiwari and I found. Groundbreaking analysis years ago by economist Jeffrey Sachs, now the director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, represented the first non-Marxist characterization of natural resources as a curse.

Scholars earlier identified a narrower version of that curse, Dutch Disease. This is the phenomenon whereby sales of oil or another natural resource harden the national currency, worsening trade for other export sectors and thereby killing them off.

Avoiding the Curse

Some countries have escaped the resource curse. One example is where the rule of law generally, and property rights specifically, are already well established when large deposits of natural resources were discovered. The U.K. survived, and benefitted, following discoveries of North Sea oil in the 1970s. Canada fared well after its discoveries of resource wealth.

The cause of a nation’s continued stability seems to be property rights. It mattered less who owned the resources -- governments, companies or a combination -- than that those rights were clear and respected. It helped too that citizens trusted their government to share the wealth over time.

Botswana Model

More like Afghanistan is Botswana, which also has tribes and was fragile when it gained dependence. Over time, and with many twists and turns, Botswana resisted pure permanent nationalization. Instead it created Debswana, a profit-share agreement with the diamond company De Beers SA.

At the same time, the government committed to fight corruption and enforce the rule of law. Both the people of Botswana and the company shareholders benefitted. A nonprofit group, the Property Rights Alliance, ranks Botswana 44th in the world in property rights among nations, whereas Nigeria is 109 and Zimbabwe ranks 121.

Infant mortality in Botswana has dropped to 26 per thousand in 2008 from 118 in 1960. That compares with less dramatic drops to 62 from 97 in neighboring Zimbabwe and to 96 from 157 in oil- rich Nigeria.

“Botswana’s post-colonial leadership, particularly Seretse Khama and Quett Masire, and also its major economic elites were committed to democracy, economic development, secure property rights and fairly orthodox macroeconomic policies,” says Daron Acemoglu, the economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who first called attention to Botswana’s achievement.

Implications for Afghanistan

The takeaways for Afghanistan are controversial. The first is that a functioning and representative government is necessary. To skip town after overseeing the establishment of a loose federation of tribes, which is the U.S. impulse, is to guarantee that any “backbone” becomes a bone of contention instead.

Rule of law and good leadership at the outset (right now) are likewise crucial. Property rights are primary, not secondary. It matters less who owns something than that the rights of ownership be clear. Last, citizens must know they may claim a share of some form in the mineral wealth, currently, or in the future.

Marketing such ideas is going to be next to impossible, especially after the BP Plc oil disaster. Still, a positive alternative to the Botswana property-rights model is hard to imagine. If Afghanistan and its neighbors made war over resources above the ground, why should resources below promise an outcome any different?

(Amity Shlaes, senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aZ2R54nvwXqY

[Kitschum]

More like Afghanistan is Botswana, which also has tribes and was fragile when it gained dependence. Over time, and with many twists and turns, Botswana resisted pure permanent nationalization. Instead it created Debswana, a profit-share agreement with the diamond company De Beers SA.

At the same time, the government committed to fight corruption and enforce the rule of law. Both the people of Botswana and the company shareholders benefitted. A nonprofit group, the Property Rights Alliance, ranks Botswana 44th in the world in property rights among nations, whereas Nigeria is 109 and Zimbabwe ranks 121.

Infant mortality in Botswana has dropped to 26 per thousand in 2008 from 118 in 1960. That compares with less dramatic drops to 62 from 97 in neighboring Zimbabwe and to 96 from 157 in oil- rich Nigeria.

“Botswana’s post-colonial leadership, particularly Seretse Khama and Quett Masire, and also its major economic elites were committed to democracy, economic development, secure property rights and fairly orthodox macroeconomic policies,” says Daron Acemoglu, the economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who first called attention to Botswana’s achievement.

First of all, Botswana might be "more like Afghanistan" but only in a very relative sense. But besides that, and "rule of law" and "property rights" would indeed be great lessons for Afghanis to learn by magic somehow (recall that this is a country where the Communist rule was practically a golden age of prosperity by comparison), there's a big caveat to Botswana's success that is rarely highlighted by these rah-rah commentators:

Botswana is experiencing one of the most severe HIV/AIDS epidemics in the world. The national HIV prevalence rate among adults ages 15 to 49 is 24.1 percent, which is among the highest in sub-Saharan Africa. The primary mode of transmission is heterosexual contact, with the military and young women at higher risk of HIV infection than other populations. Young men ages 15 to 24 experience an HIV prevalence rate of 5.7 percent, while young women in the same age group experience prevalence rates of 15.3 percent. HIV infection rates also vary by geographical region and are highest in towns, lower in cities, and lowest in villages.
...
Between 1999 and 2005, Botswana lost approximately 17 percent of its health care workforce due to AIDS, and by 2020 the loss in agricultural labor force could be more than 20 percent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_Botswana

Comparison here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_HIV/AIDS_adult_prevalence_rate

Of all the world, Botswana only trails Lesotho, Swaziland and Zimbabwe by a hair.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Point being that the existence of such vast mineral treasures has very little liklihood of improving the welfare of the people of Afghanistan or otherwise mitigating the violence. Thus the point of the article remains, even moreso if the best case Botswana model is an overstated one.

[Kitschum]

I am just vastly more pessimistic.

[Voskhod]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_Botswana

It's not like it's really their fault.

[Kitschum]

What do you mean? It's an enormous failure of government.

[Alexander's Horse]

great, something else for the Afghans to fight about

[Theben]

Are you still there?

[Rufus T. Firefly]

This.

The Mineral Miracle? Or a Massive Information Operation?
By Marc Ambinder
Were it not for the byline of James Risen, a New York Times reporter currently in a legal battle with the Obama administration over the identity of his sources, a second read of his blockbuster A1 story this morning, U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan, would engender some fairly acute skepticism. For one, a simple Google search identifies any number of previous stories with similar details.
The Bush Administration concluded in 2007 that Afghanistan was potentially sitting on a goldmine of mineral resources and that this fact ought to become a central point of U.S. policy in bolstering the government.

The Soviets knew this in 1985, as a 2002 history of the region's economy shows:

Afghanistan has reserves of a wide variety of nonenergy mineral resources, including iron, chrome, copper, silver, gold barite sulfur, talc, magnesium, mica, marble, and lapis lazuli. By 1985 Soviet surveys had also revealed potentially useful deposits of asbestos, nickel, mercury, lead, zinc, bauxite, lithium, and rubies. The Afghan government in the mid-1980s was preparing to develop a number of these resources on a large scale with Soviet technical assistance. These efforts were directed primarily at the country's large iron and copper reserves. The iron ore deposits contained an estimated 1.7 billion tons of mixed hematite and magnetite, averaging 62 percent iron. These reserves, among the world's largest, arelocated at Hajji Gak, almost 4,000 meters up in the Hindu Kush, northwest of Kabul in Bamian Province. Development started in 1983, and because the Afghan authorities had put forth no plan to establish an iron and steel industry, the output appeared destined for the Soviet steel mills in Tashkent.


A former senior State Department official said that regular discussions between the U.S. and the Karzai government over how to best exploit the resources for potential future use were ongoing when he was privy to those discussions around 2006.

By 2009, the government had already begun to solicit bids for various mining opportunities.

Jonathan Landay of McClatchy was on to the geopolitical importance of Afghanistan's mineral reserves in 2009, writing that China's thirst for coal might be the key to regional stabilization.

Already, there are accusations that the REAL reason the US is in Afghanistan is because WE want to exploit those mines. That's a passable but facile interpretation of what's going on here.

The way in which the story was presented -- with on-the-record quotations from the Commander in Chief of CENTCOM, no less -- and the weird promotion of a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense to Undersecretary of Defense suggest a broad and deliberate information operation designed to influence public opinion on the course of the war. Indeed, as every reader of Jared Diamond's popular works of geographic determinism knows well, a country rich in mineral resources will tend toward stability over time, assuming it has a strong, central, and stable government.

Risen's story notes that the minerals discovery comes at a propitious time. He focuses on lithium, a critical component of electronics. One official tells him that Afghanistan could become the "Saudi Arabia of lithium" -- a comparison to oil. (I can see it now: "We must wean ourselves off our dependence on foreign lithium!")

The general perception about the war here and overseas is that the counterinsurgency strategy has failed to prop up Hamid Karzai's government in critical areas, and is destined to ultimately fail. This is not how the war was supposed to be going, according to the theorists and policy planners in the Pentagon's policy shop.

What better way to remind people about the country's potential bright future -- and by people I mean the Chinese, the Russians, the Pakistanis, and the Americans -- than by publicizing or re-publicizing valid (but already public) information about the region's potential wealth?

The Obama administration and the military know that a page-one, throat-clearing New York Times story will get instant worldwide attention. The story is accurate, but the news is not that new; let's think a bit harder about the context.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/06/the-mineral-miracle-or-a-massive-information-operation/58104/

Exactly what I was thinking from the morning the story broke, especially since it followed so hot on the heels of postponing the Kandahar "it's-not-an-operation."