Well, it ain’t. Propagating the myth is the sometimes sensible paleo-populist James K. Pinkerton, who, while parking his fedora at the American Conservative, serves up a sensible take on Afghanistan, a-wishin’ and a-hopin’ that his sometime main man Donald Trump would not listen to the military intellectual complex and get the hell out of central Asia. Yet in his penultimate paragraph, he strikes a wistful note:
Yes, it’s intriguing to note that Afghanistan has trillions of dollars’ worth of natural resources waiting to be mined. And so if a stable regime could ever be established in that war-crossed land, great wealth could spring forth. But that’s a manifest destiny for someone else, not Uncle Sam.
In fact, I remember reading, and scoffing at, a piece in the New York Times back in 2010, touting, naturally, a Pentagon study touting the untold mineral riches of Afghanistan, “U.S. Identifies Vast Mineral Riches in Afghanistan”, recounting, in those tones of breathless innocence that the Times traditionally reserves for Pentagon press releases, the wonders that lay beneath the Afghan’s stony soil:
“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.”
The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan’s existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the United States and other industrialized countries. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is only about $12 billion.
I scoffed because I’d heard the exact same thing about Vietnam, where I spent some time, and I have continued scoffing (silently) because since reading that article back in 2010, I’ve heard exactly zero discussion about that potential huge significance, which, apparently, has remained far more potential than huge.
Yet something else occurred to me as well. How rich is “rich”? The Times story says “nearly a trillion.” Jim says “trillions” and links to Wikipedia, which says “US$3 trillion”, linking to the Independent, “Afghanistan's resources could make it the richest mining region on earth”, published, like the Times piece, back in 2010 and citing the same Pentagon study: “Afghanistan, often dismissed in the West as an impoverished and failed state, is sitting on $1 trillion of untapped minerals, according to new calculations from surveys conducted jointly by the Pentagon and the US Geological Survey.”
Well, one trillion, three trillion, what’s the difference? Once you get past a trillion, it’s all gravy, right?
Well, no. The U.S. and China, to name two countries, are well past the ten trillion mark in GDP, so one trillion ain’t all that, and the difference between one trillion and three trillion is larger than the difference between one and three.
And then I did some more thinking. What are the natural resources of other countries worth? Is everyone being simply being hypnotized by “a trillion”? Yeah, I’d like to have a trillion dollars, but being a trillion-dollar dude and a trillion-dollar country are two different things. So I went back to the Internet and searched for information on countries’ estimated natural resources and this is what I found:
Well, actually, I found several sources who said several things, but (it seems) an outfit called “Statista” was the ultimate source of the data, which got mangled and misunderstood by others. Anyway, the way Statista ranked it was this: Russia, $75 trillion; US, $45 trillion; Saudi Arabia, $34 trillion; Canada, $33 trillion; Iran, $27 trillion; China, $23 trillion; Brazil, $22 trillion; Australia, $20 trillion; Iraq, $16 trillion; Venezuela, $14 trillion. So, again, one trillion ain’t all that.
Furthermore, don’t believe everything you read in the American Conservative, the New York Times, Wikipedia, the Independent, or (I guess), anywhere else. Particularly if it comes from the Pentagon.
