I am the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for The Seminal and Brave New Foundation. You can read my work on The Seminal or at Rethink Afghanistan. The views expressed below are my own.
By now everyone has just about lost their damn minds about this New York Times article detailing Afghanistan's "discovery" of vast amounts of mineral wealth. Yes, it's way crazy old information (like the 70's old). Yes, it's Soviet Pentagon propaganda. If you've been reading us here, you already know ISAF's counter-insurgency strategy is a flaming wreck, and you already know what they're going to do about that. Propaganda and misinformation are all part of it.
But if your reaction has been typical, that of only sneering derision and snide condescension (guilty!), you've missed the point. Part of understanding propaganda is knowing its intended audience. We do this automatically when, say, Iranian President Ahmadinejad blames evil CIA spies for whatever it is that's bothering him that day; unemployment, tummy ache, whatever. We understand right away that this is not about us, about Americans. Rather, it's aimed at a domestic Iranian audience with very real fears about foreign interference. Only in the case of Afghanistan's minerals, we're personalizing it, assuming it's aimed at us. It's not for you, though. This propaganda has a very specific audience, and so far it's working perfectly.
Steve Hynd picks up on it [emphasis mine]:
However, guaranteed U.S. access to "strategic reserves" of "strategic minerals", where possession is nine tenths of the game and the resources are just as valuable still in the ground as mined and processed for market, is a heady brew to mostly-hawkish senior policymakers and Very Serious think-tankers, especially if the end of the sentence goes 'and China doesn't get them". Risen's stenography isn't aimed at us, but at them and will be used to add some geopolitical weight to the arguements McChrystal and others are already beginning to make as to why they should be allowed to break their promise to Obama and the U.S. should stay in Afghanistan a few years longer.
How do we know this? Well, there are some very obvious clues. The article is loaded with crunchy, fact-y bits that appear substantive, but in reality have nothing to do with what's actually at stake. Does it matter that they have rare-earth minerals and lithium for laptops and so on? No, it doesn't matter if they struck the mother lode of chocolate ice cream. As Blake Hounsel writes, they don't even have concrete, much less a sophisticated, multi-billion dollar mining industry capable of extracting, processing, and marketing these minerals to international companies. They want it to look like a lot of information ("Wow, lookit all the minerals!") but not actually answer any real questions ("Wait, can they even get it?").
Think-tankers love this kind of crap. They'd like nothing better than to somehow fit COIN and iPads (like most in the media, they're commercial shills for both) into the same article. If you like your Macbook and your Prius and that application that makes your telephone fart, well, you'd better support our batshit crazy idea of invading and bombing Afghan into a peaceful democracy. Otherwise the Chinese will steal all of that copper, and they don't give us anything (except everything).
But it's better than that. You also have gems like this:
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 Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.During the chaos of the 1990s, when Afghanistan was mired in civil war and later ruled by the Taliban, a small group of Afghan geologists protected the charts by taking them home, and returned them to the Geological Survey's library only after the American invasion and the ouster of the Taliban in 2001.
We love to imagine the brown people we're obliterating with missiles secretly know of our righteousness, deep down on the inside. Oh, that smart local, he secretly knows we're the good guys! If you've ever read Richard Clarke's epic, high fantasy novel Scorpion's Gate, you already know this character. In it, a Saudi oil prince secretly falls in love with American democracy and carries out a coup, pretty much turning Saudi Arabia into Switzerland overnight. Of course, this is about as believable as some old, white Tea Partier in Oklahoma secretly reading the Hadith and the collected works of Sayyid Qutb in his basement, but whatever, foreign policy hawks never get tired of fetishing their own pet locals. Those Afghans know the truth, we're the good guys!
Now that we're clear who this propaganda about Afghanistan's minerals is aimed at, is it working? See for yourself:
in emerging and underdeveloped states, weak legal systems and official corruption create incentives for powerful people to exploit those resources, rather than allow mineral wealth to fuel national renewal. Think Congo or Sierra Leone. It's easy to tick off the ways in which what political scientists call the "Resource Curse" applies to Afghanistan: a tenuous legal structure; warlordism; war; foreign interventionism; corruption throughout the political system; an uneasy and unstable relationship between provincial and national authorities; and an uneasy and unstable relationship in provinces and districts with instruments of local governance as well as national governance.
But there's a couple problems with this. Right away, it's not a "curse." A curse implies that it's somehow mystical, a supernatural affliction. Turning into Dracula is a curse. Discovering vast mineral wealth is not a curse. It's not a magical mystery why Afghanistan, or any other country, suffers from this so-called curse. Ackerman was quite clear: "Tenuous legal structure; warlordism; war; foreign interventionism; corruption." Well gee whiz, how do you suppose that stuff happened? Foreign intervention? War? Are we so stupid that we don't realize what we're saying? War is a deliberate policy we choose, we fund, and we carry out. It's not "oops, I guess Afghanistan is cursed." We did that.
But this obliviousness is also where we see the exact impact of the mineral propaganda. This isn't "pro-war" propaganda so much as it is feeding excuses for why the war is failing. A failing war simply implies more war as icing on the cake. Remember, you can never blame the COIN strategy, it is sacred. But you can blame everything else, including Afghanistan itself. Andrew Exum spells it out for us:
But counterinsurgency strategies rest on the assumption that you can eventually weaken anti-government forces and reduce levels of violence to the point where a political process can take place in more peaceful circumstances. We now have one trillion fresh reasons why this assumption might not be valid for Afghanistan. I am not yet sure what this means for either U.S. and allied interests or the current strategy. I more or less agree with today's editorial in the New York Times that our current strategy "still seems like the best chance to stabilize Afghanistan and get American troops home." But as the editorial noted, the news last week from Afghanistan was terrible. And I'm not sure this week's news is any better.
See, Afghanistan is war torn, so that's why our war isn't working. Clearly the solution is more war. Voila! Resource Curse!
As we see, this isn't some every day propaganda trying pitifully to sell a trillion dollar debt-war to a nation of unemployed. This is a very specific talking point explicitly targeting the foreign policy community, all as a part of the Pentagon's blame game. It makes the Pentagon appear desperate, sure, but this isn't a joke, some embarassing gaffe by the PR department. This is very real and very effective military propaganda. Blame everything, blame the Afghans, blame their lithium, just please don't blame the war.
Want to save the princess and free Afghanistan of its mystical resource curse, also known as pressuring congress to end the war? You can do that. Join us on Rethink Afghanistan's Facebook page and collaborate with the tens of thousands of others around the country working to bring this war to an end.
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The logistical economics are not in place to bring them here. We have better sources of rare earths, Iron's bulk ensures processing abroad as does coppers. And 3/4ths of gold consumption is in India. Now the elite know this.
You may see a few american firms partnering with the chinese. This story is about convincing the american people there is an economic engine that can enable a stable afganistan. As china inked a copper deal a good while ago I expect the next big news will be a major china/afganistan Iron deal that will be trumpeted. Quite possibly with Rio Tinto (Aussi/Brit) as a economic silent partner in the iron venture.
Most mining conglomerates are not US based anyways.
The attraction for US Hawk's is that China will get them. That China the largest source of FDI in afganistan who due to the Uighur situation in Western China has no love for fundamentalist islam will invest heavily in these vital resources creating a revenue stream that can prop up a strong centralized military power structure (We end up supplying). That with their own security concerns in western china as well as an imperative resource need we will be able to transition afganistan from our economic sinkhole to Us. With a few NATO alliance corporations having ownership stakes of royalty production values.