A team of U.S. geologists and Pentagon officials has discovered vast mineral wealth in Afghanistan, conceivably enough to turn the scarred and impoverished country into one of the world's most lucrative mining centers, a senior military official told Fox News on Monday.
"There is stunning potential here," Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, told the New York Times in a report published Monday. "There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant."
Anyone that has seen Blood Diamonds knows that a vast amount of natural resources doesn't necessarily lead to wealth and prosperity. That said, Afghanistan has had nothing but poppy and it's in desperate need of natural resources that can be turned into wealth.
On a similar note, Israel recently discovered a vast amount of natural gas.
A door has been closed. But amid the roar, the creak of an opening window was faintly audible. This window, a gigantic deposit of natural gas called Leviathan, 6.5 times the size of Tel Aviv, was found, roughly 100 nautical miles from where the flotilla fiasco took place and well within Israel's extended territorial waters. This discovery may provide Israel with security in terms of its supply of electricity, turn it into an important natural gas exporter and provide a shot in the arm of some $300 billion over the life of the field - one-and-a-half times the national GDP - to the Israeli economy, already one of the most resilient in the world.
At the beginning of 2009, Israel made a major natural gas discovery that immediately made it a player in the natural gas market. This may be twice the size of that discovery. With Israel a major exporter of natural gas, the geopolitical environment in the Middle East.
The Pentagon and the Russians have known about extensive mineral deposits in Afghanistan for years.
ReplyDeleteThis is not new.