Afghan war cost likely to exceed $1tn mineral asset discovery
Posted on 15 June 2010 with 2 comments from readers
The total cost of the US war in Afghanistan is likely to exceed the $1 trillion value of mineral wealth recently discovered in the country by the US Geological Survey.
In 2007 the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the total cost of US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan would be $2.4 trillion by 2017, and noted that $200 billion had already been spent in Afghanistan alone.
War expensive
Economists point out that the same sum applied to reconstruction and rebuilding these war damaged countries would produce a functioning economy similar in scale to Australia. Meanwhile, Afghanistan has a GDP of $12 billion and an economy based on narcotics.
Economic development would indeed be best promoted by investment in the exploitation of natural resources rather than continuous warfare.
The revelation that the mineral resources of Afghanistan are worth $1 trillion, a sum that could bring an oil economy type of boom to the country, is therefore interesting but irrelevant while war persists. Much the same could be said of the oil and gas sector in Iraq.
Imagine the scale of the challenge in turning a backward country like Afghanistan with its heavily armed and uneducated tribesmen into a commodities superpower. Taliban leaders might see this as ‘god’s gift to the land of Afghanistan’ but they do not have the capacity to get this wealth out of the ground.
Peace and stability
Only peace and stability and the expertise of industrialized nations can do that. Middle Eastern conspiracy theorists will doubtless see this as a $1 trillion carrot to encourage peace, or is it a justification for the mounting cost of this unwinnable war?
The US has the biggest and most expensive military machine in history and yet is unable to beat ignorant tribesmen in a small backward nation. It would be cheaper to hand every one of the population $1 million each and end the conflict with smiles all round.
That is unlikely to happen, and it is just as likely that the minerals in Afghanistan will stay in the ground. No multinational is going to be able to risk its staff in present circumstances, and the democratic government established at such huge cost is too corrupt and incompetent to handle this process.
It is a mess but at least a $1 trillion minerals deposit gets people thinking about what to do next.
2 Comments posted by readers:
Once the US gets out, within 5 years the Taliban will rule Afghanistan and invite the Chinese in to do the mining. The Chinese will bribe whoever they need to, and the Taliban will use the money to try to start a civil war inside Iran. Pakistan will also be in their sights. If they can ever gain control of Pakistan, they will have nuclear weapons. The probability of nuclear war will then be vastly increased. They will also attempt to spread their radical Islam to the northern ’stans’ and become a problem for Russia and eventually, western China.
Ed Note: Agreed but that does not mean military is the only option, or that a more sustainable economic development program would not reduce the total cost in the long run. The US has been appallingly negligent in post-war planning in both Iraq and Afghanistan and the price paid is high in human life and dollars.
We are not here to WIN anything. This is not a war. It is a stablaization and reconstruction effort. Get real.