http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MH05Df02.htmlWhen, in June of 2010, the New York Times featured an article reporting that the United States had "discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan" (and that the country could be "transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world"), you could hear the scoffing all the way to Foggy Bottom. "That's just great," a career diplomat with more than 20 years of service in South Asia said, "but just who the hell is supposed to provide security for us to get to it?"
That was only the beginning. The article brought a near avalanche of derisive comments: that the report was a part of a government orchestrated "information operation" to sell the Afghan war to the American people, that there was "less to the scoop than meets
the eye", that the findings had appeared earlier in other publications, and that the corruption in the Afghan government would only be "amplified" by the findings. The article's author, James Risen, struck back: "Bloggers," he said, "should do their own reporting instead of sitting around in their pajamas."
The "Risen" broo-ha is now more than two years old, and yet the story of Afghan's mineral wealth, and the prospects that its development could help to stabilize the country, refuses to die. The primary reason for that is because Paul Brinkley, the head of the Pentagon's Task Force for Business and Stability Operations in Afghanistan, has refused to let it die.
Brinkley, a bullet-headed Texas A&M engineer and former Silicon Valley businessman, has been arguing since 2004 that America has to find new ways of thinking about political stability operations in conflict societies. Or, as a Pentagon expert on Afghanistan puts it, "we need to find a way to provide 18-year-old Afghans with an alternative to toting a gun".
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