Is the tide of fortune about to turn for miserable, war-torn Afghanistan? American geologists say they have discovered that the country is sitting on mineral deposits worth $1 trillion - enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and change the course of history.

The deposits include iron, copper, cobalt, gold and lithium, a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and mobile phones. The deposits are so big that the country could become one of the most important mining centres in the world. A Pentagon memo says Afghanistan could become the "Saudi Arabia of lithium".

Read more: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/64501,news-comment,news-politics,minerals-worth-1-trillion-discovered-in-afghanistan-pentagon-taliban#ixzz0qvMcR1UV
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Gus: let's not forget that this has be "rediscovered" mineral wealth... The mineral wealth of that country was quite well-known in the 1970s... And at the rate things are going, the price on the little poppies might be more profitable for the locals rather than having multinationals plunder the buried loot and handing out backsheesh worth three and a half goats...

from Chris Floyd

Trillion-Dollar Bash: Mineral Find Means More Blood Money in Afghan War
Written by Chris Floyd      

The New York Times reports on the discovery by American geologists that Afghanistan contains "vast riches" in untapped mineral deposits: at least $1 trillion worth -- including huge troves of lithium, "a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys," as the paper breathlessly relates.

Unfortunately, given the realities of our world, one's first reaction to such news is not a cheery "How nice for the Afghan people!" but rather a heart-sinking, dread-clammy "Uh oh." For what this discovery almost certainly portends are many more decades of war, warlordism and foreign intervention, as the forces of greed and power fight like hyenas to tear off the juiciest chunks of this windfall.

It also guarantees many more years of American military occupation (in one guise or another); there is absolutely no chance that our Beltway banditti (and their corporate cronies) are simply going to walk away from a stash like this, not when they've already got "boots on the ground" -- and billions of dollars in war pork invested in the place. It's payback time, baby! (Or rather, double-dip time, as most these "investments" are just pass-throughs of public money to private profiteers). And hey, finder's keepers and all that, right?

The Times story is the usual splattered mess of regurgitated Pentagon PR and imperial spin, with a few small bits of pertinent information here and there.

The story first displays its "savvy" cred by noting the possible downsides of the find. ("Hey, we're not just cheerleaders, you know!") It could make the Taliban fight even harder. It could exacerbate the corruption of the American-installed Afghan government. It could set off conflicts between Afghan tribes and warlord factions to control the mining. It could wreak environmental ruin. And it seems it could tempt grasping greedy foreigners to prey upon the war-ravaged Afghans and steal their wealth:

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see toon at top...

Occupational Hazards: Praise the Warlord and Pass the Ammunition
Written by Chris Floyd      

High comedy from the Gray Lady:

American taxpayers have inadvertently created a network of warlords across Afghanistan who are making millions of dollars escorting NATO convoys and operating outside the control of either the Afghan government or the American and NATO militaries, according to the results of a Congressional investigation released Monday.

"Inadvertently!" Really, what yocks!

Coincidentally, I am currently reading a new edition of Norman Stone's 1964 book, The Honoured Society, dealing with the great "surge" of Mafia power in Sicily in the post-WWII years. Stone, who was in Sicily at the time, tells an interesting story of how the American military government "inadvertently" restored the Mafia to feudal lordship over Sicily by "inadvertently" placing Mafia leaders and their associates in charge of towns and villages all over Sicily, "inadvertently" giving them carte blanche to create a vast black market, "inadvertently" allowing them to crush any movement toward land reform or unionized labor, and "inadvertently" putting the political process in their stranglehold, laying the foundation for generations of violence, terror, corruption, suffering and deprivation for ordinary people.

As Stone notes:

Don Caló received the loyalist cooperation in these [black market] manoeuvres from his friends in AMGOT [Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories], who supplied the passes necessary for his caravan of trucks to travel without impediment up and down the roads of Sicily. At about that time, AMGOT in Sicily had fallen under the sway of its unofficial adviser, Vito Genovese, an American gangster -- later named as head of the Mafia offshoot, Cosa Nostra -- who had disappeared after his indictment on a charge of murder and turned up in Italy. Don Caló found Genovese most accommodating. From AMGOT came all the petrol he required, and sometimes, when he was short of transport for an exceptionally large shipment, his friends helped out with a military vehicle or two.

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Gus: dig baby dig... Pass the moral mustard and see toon at top.

 

 

Afghanistan wants more Australian help - not from the military, but from Australian mining companies - to kick-start a post-war economy with a mining boom.

"So far I have not got in touch with any of the major Australian investors - Australian companies like Rio Tinto, BHP and the others - but I'm going to Melbourne to see if there is a possibility of getting those major companies interested," Afghanistan's ambassador to Australia, Nasir Andisha, said.

Afghanistan, like Australia, is rich in natural resources - iron ore, copper, gold, lithium, coal, uranium, oil and gas.

So far Chinese and Indian companies have been given the frontrunning in exploiting these resources.

The last mining boom in Afghanistan was over 2,000 years ago in the era of Alexander the Great, when gold, silver and precious stones were routinely mined.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-12-18/afghanistan-seeking-help-to-kick-start-mining-boom/3736878

 

SEE TOON AND STORY AT TOP...

 

Since 2010, the Pentagon has covertly mapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan worth more than three trillion US dollars. Those resources were, until short hours ago, largely inaccessible.

That is no longer the case. The Taliban (banned in Russia) had, over the past decade, written letter after letter to American diplomats and congressional leaders, offering to end the war but hand these key resources over to American companies.

This was the deal the US was offered, almost “too good to be true,” one that is supposedly “on the table” now that the civil war is over.

However, that deal is dematerializing minute by minute and what is killing it is this, a massive propaganda effort not unlike the fake stories of incubator kidnappings and murders in Kuwait after the “misunderstanding with Iraq.”

The Taliban is now, according to the US media, sending terror bombers around the world, burning women alive and filling secret underground prison with thousands.

There is no evidence, not an iota, of any of this. Kabul is quiet. There is no gunfire. There are no arrests being made. If what has happened around Afghanistan with the collapse of the Ghani regime continues, the Taliban may well be showing a new leaf, with the excesses of the past being relegated to the past. We watch.

Peace in Afghanistan could be at hand if we are to believe the Taliban. They tell us they have issue an amnesty for all former backers of the fallen government.

Women are keeping their rights, jobs and even graduate educations and, thus far, the 6000 US troops that landed at the Karzai Airport are being ignored by the Taliban.

The Taliban says the Americans are legitimate guests, this time at least, who are expected to leave and take with them who and what? Mercenaries? Drug lab chemists?

There is another story as well, a press war has begun against the Taliban, one of nefarious purpose and of devastating brutality. This is the Lie Machine going into gear, poisoning the future of Afghanistan if it can and there is very little that the Lie Machine can’t do.

It has only been hours, short days that President Ghani fled the nation with little more than the clothes on his back and, allegedly, 4 cars, a helicopter and over a billion dollars in American cash.

Within minutes a new war began though no fighting is now going on in Afghanistan and, quite frankly, little evidence that any fighting has gone on there for weeks.

You see, the fall of the West’s puppet government in Afghanistan isn’t a bit like the Fall of Saigon, an analogy we are recently drowning in.

The only war that was going on before this, and for years as well, was one of paid mercenaries doing just enough to keep their American handlers happy.

Cash came to Afghanistan, endless cash, nearly one trillion US dollars.

Drugs flowed out of Afghanistan too, major USAID projects, new farms, working with soil, dams and irrigation projects while even darker money built heroin processing labs disguised as “dry cleaning plants.”

Enough dry-cleaning chemicals were trucked into Afghanistan from Karachi to do the Saudi Royal family’s robes for a thousand years.

For years now, Afghanistan has been a playground for sexual deviants among the NGOs and mercenary contractors, among the military elites of the West, and let us not forget the endless train of legislators and minor “diplomats” whose “dancing boy” vacations kept them lingering around Kabul.

This is the truth of it but only a small dose of truth. Real “truth” is out there as well, a truth not told, a story not allowed, a story of money and power and crime.

Rare Earth Elements

Afghanistan will need money. The abandoned helicopters and tanks the US had given the Ghani regime are worthless without a war. The 300,000-man army paid for by Washington, one of the world’s largest and “best trained” had no intention of fighting a civil war.

Twenty years is a long time to fight and fighting a war for an unpopular and utterly corrupt US backed regime was always a losing proposition.

The money that can rebuild Afghanistan will come from minerals, from mines that can now be opened, minerals that can now be found, an industry that has been waiting decades to get off the ground.

But to build that industry, investment capitol is needed and foreign partners. Three major nations can do this, the United States, China and Russia.

One must also note that playing “the big three” against one another has always been the plan of the Taliban once they assumed power and that “assumption of power” has always been a guarantee.

To do this, get the best deal and the kind of deal that will respect Afghanistan’s sovereignty, nations must be free to invest and build.

What will stop them is this:

The United States, if subjected to enough horrific propaganda, and that has already begun, will be forced to “sanction” Afghanistan and any nation that tries to work there.

Current projects with India and China would end, thousands of jobs would disappear but, moreover, development would end. This what the US did to Syria with their Caesar Act.

The justification for crushing the Syrian people was carefully orchestrated propaganda coordinated with false flag terrorism.

This is what is now being done in Afghanistan but the force and direction behind this effort is more difficult to ascertain. This doesn’t seem to be a struggle for political power but rather a “spat” between international banking cartels fighting over the rotting corpses of the Afghani people.

Part of the reason for the US staying in Afghanistan was natural resources. There is no semi-conductor industry without rare earth elements. Fluctuations in those markets, in those highly secretive markets, reductions in supply for instance, can impact nation economies quickly.

Why can’t the US build cars anymore? Experts say semiconductors are not being produced, could a shortage of rare earth elements be the root cause?

Well, if Afghanistan “comes online,” meaning any victor, even the Taliban in the civil war, those who control the rare earth elements, who control semi-conductor manufacturing and almost everything else as well, lose power.

Therefore, for the United States, its own mining companies have been waiting to get into Afghanistan for decades.

In 1992, the Nathan Berger Studies Project on Afghanistan published a report on mineral resources in Afghanistan. This report outlined what would be needed to restore Afghanistan’s infrastructure after years of internal strife and what resources could be expected to be brought online afterwards.

The list of minerals is staggering, not just coal and iron ore but rare earths, emeralds, copper, chromite and considerable oil and gas as well.

Then there are the rare earth elements. From NBC News, 2014:

Despite being one of the poorest nations in the world, Afghanistan may be sitting on one of the richest troves of minerals in the world, valued at nearly $1 trillion, scientists say.

Afghanistan, a country nearly the size of Texas, is loaded with minerals deposited by the violent collision of the Indian subcontinent with Asia. The US Geological Survey began inspecting what mineral resources Afghanistan had after US-led forces drove the Taliban from power in the country in 2004.

In 2006, US researchers flew airborne missions to conduct magnetic, gravity and hyperspectral surveys over Afghanistan.

The aerial surveys determined that Afghanistan may hold 60 million tons of copper, 2.2 billion tons of iron ore, 1.4 million tons of rare earth elements such as lanthanum, cerium and neodymium, and lodes of aluminum, gold, silver, zinc, mercury and lithium. For instance, the Khanneshin carbonatite deposit in Afghanistan’s Helmand province is valued at $89 billion, full as it is with rare earth elements.

In 2010, the USGS data attracted the attention of the US Department of Defense’s Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, which is entrusted with rebuilding Afghanistan. The task force valued Afghanistan’s mineral resources at $908 billion, while the Afghan government’s estimate is $3 trillion.

Over the past four years, USGS and TFBSO have embarked on dozens of excursions to confirm the aerial findings, resulting in what are essentially treasure maps for mining companies.

Conclusion

Can CNN or Fox News turn the collapse of the miserable Ghani regime in Kabul into a new “holocaust” built of lies and fog?

This is exactly what they are doing, hired guns but for what client?

We could go further, delving into layered conspiracies, and question as to how much of what has happened with the end of the civil war in Afghanistan may well have been planned and not by the Taliban.

As always, we ask, “why now” and “who benefits?”

Who controls the American press? Note we didn’t ask if the American press is controlled, that part has been obvious for a very long time.

Is the game one of manipulating the semi-conductor industry, which if you haven’t noticed is the controlling factor of our times?

Could it be simpler, manipulating world commodity markets while playing Afghanistan the same way events in the Straits of Hormuz are handled, manipulated tied to trades in oil futures.

What can we assume? Crime for profit is the game and if it means millions suffer or even millions die, so be it.

 

 

Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

 

Read more:

https://journal-neo.org/2021/08/18/why-the-lie-machine-is-grinding-afghanistan-into-dust/

 

Read from top.

 

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