Apparently, we shouldn’t have left Afghanistan because the place is packed with valuable minerals, and now, the Chinese are going to get them.
This assertion is nonsense engendered by ignorance of the subject. I should reveal that I wrote a book on this particular point (free, here).
There are only 92 naturally occurring elements, and everything is made of them. This works the other way, too — near everything is some mixture of those 92 elements. Sure, Afghanistan has lithium, rare earths, copper, etc. But the oceans also contain lithium (180 billion tonnes, in fact), and AT&T used to have, in the telephone network, the world’s largest and purest copper deposit.
Miners make a useful distinction about all this. If a profit can be made extracting from a rock, then the rock is an ore. If a profit isn’t possible, then it’s just dirt made up of the usual mixture of everything. Miners spend many years and a great deal of money checking whether something is ore or is just dirt.
This has not been done in Afghanistan. These tales of trillions in ore values (one estimate is $3 trillion) are from Soviet-era and sketchy surface surveys. No one has done the drilling and sampling to see whether extraction would be economic. If you tried to sell this stuff as a mineral reserve on a stock exchange, you might be arrested for fraud.
It gets worse than that.
The estimate of trillions in value doesn’t include the cost of doing the actual mining. What about the costs of getting ore out of the ground, refining it, or getting it out of Afghanistan? The reason we don’t mine the oceans for lithium, or Mount Rushmore for rare earths, is that the costs would be greater than the receipts.
We know that Afghanistan has a bunch of rocks that are made of stuff. That’s also about all we know. Sorry, there really isn’t one of those magic treasure maps pointing us to a fortune. Nor a valid basis for an estimation of trillions of dollars in value.
Why don’t we start basing public policy, even the public conversation, on the science of a matter?
