To our eternal shame we linked to "Pentagon Preps Afghans for Trillion-Dollar Treasure Hunt" in 2011:
The Pentagon wants the world to know: When the American military stops spending billions per week in Afghanistan and eventually goes home, the Afghan economy is gonna be totally fine. After all, they’re sitting on trillions in mineral deposits, just waiting to be mined.
Too bad many of the mines are in regions too dangerous or geographically treacherous for companies to set up camp. And it’ll take at least a decade before the mines yield tangible goods, and the profits that accompany them.
A year ago, the New York Times gushingly pronounced that Afghanistan, with at least $1 trillion in untapped minerals, was poised to become “the Saudi Arabia of lithium.” Now, the Pentagon has announced plans to train Afghans in “airborne geophysical exploration.” The project will harness the latest in geophysical mapping technology, which uses aerial sensors to detect the specific quantity of minerals in precise locations, and how readily accessible they are.....
And to our eternal credit we had linked to "Afghan Lithium And Other Mineral Nonsense"a year earlier:
Set your stop (common sense) watches!I’ll bet that there is an Afghan Minerals, Inc (or Ltd) or an Afghan Minerals Fund (or ‘Trust’) by the end of the week, if not sooner, listed on an American secondary exchange and surely in Toronto, Vancouver, Sydney, and Frankfurt…The New York Times has today, June 14, 2010 (Flag Day here in the USA) delivered a pieces of first-class political theater.
We are supposed to believe that one of the most primitive societies in the world – the cash crop of which is opium, and the actual government of which is tribal, fragmented, religiously fundamentalist, and hostile to Western values in general – is going to suddenly realize that the very little value its people get by being at the bottom of both the supply and value chain for narcotics, is going to be now supplanted by the very little value they will get from being at the very bottom of the supply and value chains for minerals needed by every other culture but the Afghan. Even the warlords (read ‘local officials’) would get less from mining companies than they get today from illegal drug distributors, so they’ll sign on, of course.The New York Times is either acting as the agent of the US Department of State or just as the agent of the absurd.
Afghanistan is not the Saudi Arabia of lithium; it is the Saudi Arabia of ladies’ fashion. Afghans know as much about the one as the Saudis know about the other....
And today's headline story from Mining.com, August 27:
How Afghanistan’s $1 trillion mining wealth sold the war
After the fall of Kabul, US media regurgitates a 2010 New York Times frontpage story on Afghanistan’s mineral riches based on a secret Pentagon memo and a 1977 Soviet geologic map.
Search for Afghanistan minerals and you get dozens of articles written in the last few days quoting a magical $1 trillion number including gems like The Taliban are sitting on $1 trillion worth of minerals the world desperately needs (CNN), Afghanistan: Taliban to reap $1 trillion mineral wealth (Deutsche Welle), Biden Just Handed Afghanistan’s Mineral Wealth to China (Newsweek), China Eyes Afghanistan’s $1 Trillion of Minerals With Risky Bet on Taliban (Bloomberg) and so on.
All the one trillion dollar articles are derived from a breathless June 2010 New York Times front-page story and interview with General David H Petraeus during which the commander of US forces in Afghanistan referenced a US Dept of Defense “internal memo”.
The story of how “the vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists” by the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist James Risen’s opens with a bang (emphasis added):
“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.”
The tale of the $1 trillion treasure trove – which has more than a whiff of Indiana Jones about it as told by the New York Times – begins three years after the US invaded Afghanistan:
“Technoexport”“In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan [sic] Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country.”
At first the American geologists only found hints of these huge big veins, but “they soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.”
How soon did the American geologists learn it was a Soviet study? Perhaps when they looked at the author page of the intriguing charts and data and saw this:
Abdullah, Sh., Chmyriov, V.M., Stazhilo-Alekseev, K.F, Dronov, V.I., Gannon, P.J., Lubemov, B.K., Kafarskiy, A.Kh. and Malyarov, E.P., 1977, Mineral resources of Afghanistan (2 ed.) 419 p. and Abdullah, Sh., Chmyriov, V.M. Map of mineral resources of Afghanistan V/O “Technoexport” USSR, scale: 1:500,000.
Contrary to the article, it was two years before the Soviet army invaded (hmm… what did Breshnev know about Afghan minerals and when did he know it?) and it was done under the auspices of the United Nations Development Programme (AFG/74/12).
Details. Let’s not get sidetracked.
Risen, also the recipient of the 2015 Ridenhour Courage Prize, continues:
The legend“Armed with the old Russian charts, the United States Geological Survey began a series of aerial surveys of Afghanistan’s mineral resources in 2006 using advanced gravity and magnetic measuring equipment attached to an old Navy Orion P-3 aircraft that flew over about 70 percent of the country.”
If you have such advanced tech (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, SRTM, digital elevation model, DEM) why would you need Mineral resources of Afghanistan 2nd ed., and Technoexport?....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also "Today I Learned: That The Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic Was One Of The People Who Lied Us Into The Iraq War":
And:....The Times' role as a cog in the killing machine was so blatant that in June 2014 the paper's public editor, Margaret Sullivan, wrote a column: "Covering New War, in Shadow of Old One" where she said the Times' coverage was "flawed, driven by outside agendas and lacking in needed skepticism."
She went on: "Nevertheless, given The Times’ troubled history when it comes to this subject, readers have good reason to be wary about what appears in the paper about military intervention in Iraq. And based on what I am already hearing from them, they are....:
Ha! "Intelligence Warned of Afghanistan Military Collapse, Despite Biden’s Assurances"
Right on cue we have the New York Times carrying water for the intelligence community....
