Why Are We in Afghanistan?

Journey to the Center of the Future

The Taliban is sitting atop one of the world's few known concentrations of Rare Earth Minerals - in the case of the small village of Khan Neshin (below), cerium and neodymium - and that gives these backwards Islamic fundamentalists a big say in the future of the world's technological development. Weird, right? It may also help explain why the U.S. is in Afghanistan years after our mission there to deny Al Qaeda the support of the Taliban, and even our search for Osama Bin Laden, has ended.

Why Are We in Afghanistan?

Journey to the Center of the Future

The Taliban is sitting atop one of the world's few known concentrations of Rare Earth Minerals - in the case of the small village of Khan Neshin (below), cerium and neodymium - and that gives these backwards Islamic fundamentalists a big say in the future of the world's technological development. Weird, right? It may also help explain why the U.S. is in Afghanistan years after our mission there to deny Al Qaeda the support of the Taliban, and even our search for Osama Bin Laden, has ended.

By RAR

The Moon colony in the Google satellite image above is Khan Neshin, Afghanistan, in the Helmand Province (southern part of the country). This has been the tough nut to crack for the U.S. military, for the area remains largely controlled by Taliban. For reference, see this "Map of Taliban Control", published by the New York Times in December 2009, when the U.S. surged an additional 30,000 troops into the Kabul area.

While the U.S. and its allies have had little success in 10 years in terms of ridding the country of Taliban influence - there have been ongoing talks all along to determine how the Taliban could be brought into a normalized Afghanistan government - there have been militarily-secured campaigns by the U.S. Geological Survey to map the region around Khan Neshin, which Russian scientists have reported being a location of recoverable Rare Earth Minerals. The USGS study team has located a sizable area of rocks in the center of an extinct volcano containing light rare earth elements including cerium and neodymium. It has mapped 1.3 million metric tons of desirable rock, or about 10 years of supply at current demand levels. The Pentagon has estimated its value at about $7.4 billion. (Simpson, S.: Afghanistan's Buried Riches, "Scientific American", October 2011).

Rare Earth Minerals are the doorway to the future, in terms of developing a growing list of technological developments: super-strength metals that can survive high heat conditions, useful for space travel, but presently used in baseball bats, lacrosse sticks, bicycle frames, revolvers, and light bulb elements; LED displays and cancer treatments; batteries, electronic vacuum tubes, camera and telescope lenses, medications; catalytic converters in automobiles; carbon-arc lighting (motion picture industry); aircraft engines, coloring of cubic zirconias and other glass, cigarette lighters and other handheld fire-starters; the strongest magnets currently developed; nuclear batteries and beta radiation sources; lasers; screening for genetic diseases, anti-counterfeiting phosphors in bills; shielding for nuclear reactors; color television tubes, fuel cells, naval sonar systems and certain alloys; laser materials, neutron-absorbing control rods in nuclear reactors, hard disks, absorption rods in nuclear reactors, high intensity lighting; optical amplifiers, fiber optic cables, medical and dental lasers; portable x-ray devices and high temperature superconductors; stress gauges that monitor ground deformation from earthquakes or explosions; petroleum cracking and experimental uses in certain cancer treatments.

Rare Earth Minerals are oddly named, because they exist in abundance throughout the Earth's mantle. Rarely, however, do they exist in known concentrations that makes mining them economically feasible.

China currently owns the Rare Earth Minerals (REM) market, producing approximately 129,000 of the world's 132,000 metric tons of minerals extracted so far. All indications are that China is not only ramping up production of Rare Earth Minerals, which require extraordinary ore refinement processes, but are also closing down the market by halving the number of  domestic and Sino-foreign rare-earth producers and traders, thus exploiting their monopoly and setting pricing worldwide.

The REM in Afghanistan represent a powerful bargaining chip, not only for the Taliban who control the Afghanistan ore deposits, but for the U.S. government who can benefit from a source for these rare minerals outside of China and can negotiate mining operations that could help stabilize the southern part of the country.

Throughout Afghanistan's long history of civilization, it has been a crossroads for looting empires from Hannibal to the current U.S. occupation, and through its ongoing suppression it has been unable to coalesce a tribal population into anything like a whole nation. Beyond opium production, there is barely an economy in Afghanistan.

Imagine the leap that ancient country, against all odds, may be about to take into the 21st Century and beyond, almost as if they have been given a chance to skip over the 20th Century entirely to hop-scotch from pre-modern civilization to a science-fact future in a single bound of dumb luck.                                             (052612)