Published: June 13, 2010
By JAMES RISEN
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
A bleak Ghazni Province seems to offer little, but a Pentagon study says it may have among the world’s largest deposits of lithium.
Beneath the feet of this nomadic shepherd sits vast mineral deposits of Lithium, the backbone of the modern economy.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html
“There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.” (replace significant with "profitable")
"At the same time, American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, which could upset the United States, given its heavy investment in the region. After winning the bid for its Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, China clearly wants more, American officials said.
Questions to Consider:
1) How does the presence of mineral deposits in Afghanistan effect the US war strategy? Do you think these mineral deposits (known since the 1980's by USSR geological surveys) was a reason we went into Afghanistan?
2) How does the field of Geography and Geology place into the US military-industrial complex?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html
1 comment:
Interesting to also think about the placement of this article in the trajectory of American News.
http://www.fair.org/blog/2010/06/16/risens-blogger-bashing-over-afghan-report/
... This article from FAIR points out that these discoveries were known-about for a while...
Think about this article in relationship to the TIME magazine page "What happens if we leave Afghanistan." Both try to justify our presence there: possible mineral wealth for afghans and protecting the helpless women of Afghanistan... Of course they forget to leave out that we seem to be doing the majority of civilian killings lately and furthermore that the wealth would likely not trickle down to the majority of Afghans.
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