3) As a result of all this, and
not surprising at all to people who were paying close attention
to Obama’s surge strategy, costs and death counts
are quickly rising. Jim Lobe reports from Afghanistan
that the “News is Bad.”
While U.S. officials insist they are making progress
in reversing the momentum built up by the Taliban insurgency over
the last several years, the latest news from Afghanistan suggests
the opposite may be closer to the truth.
Even senior military officials are conceding privately
that their much-touted new counterinsurgency strategy of “clear,
hold and build” in contested areas of the Pashtun southern
and eastern parts of the country are not working out as planned
despite the “surge” of some 20,000 additional U.S.
troops over the past six months.
Casualties among the nearly 130,000 U.S. and other
NATO troops now deployed in Afghanistan are also mounting quickly.
4) In a propaganda effort to spin
away from all the latest bad news, the desperate US military has
pulled this dusty old news report out of their back-pocket and
launched a psychological operation in the NY Times to give a positive
spin in hopes of further manipulating US public opinion:
U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals
in Afghanistan
The United States has discovered nearly $1
trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan,
far beyond any previously known reserves…. The previously
unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper,
cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are
so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern
industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into
one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United
States officials believe.
An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that
Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a
key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and
BlackBerrys.
In the process of this latest propaganda campaign,
the Pentagon has unwittingly exposed two things that I will now
jump on. A) The real reason why we are in this
war to begin with: it’s all about natural resources. And
B) All the BS statements about these “previously unknown
deposits” clearly prove, yet again, that the NY Times is
only too happy to play the role of a straight-up propaganda paper.
For those of us paying attention, we’ve been reading reports
about these minerals for the past decade! Roland Sheppard just
sent this along:
“The New York Times, when it was beating the
drums of war in 2002, failed to mention that the USGS published
a report, at that time, Mines and Mineral Occurrences of Afghanistan
Compiled by G.J. Orris and J.D. Bliss. Open-File Report 02-110.
On page 16, they list as ‘Significant Minerals or Materials’ magnetite,
hematite, chalcopyrite, covellite, chalcocite, cuprite, malachite,
azurite, molybdenite, and native gold – lithium is mentioned
on page 10 under ‘References.’”
So, from the very beginning, as I went into further
detail in the past, the war in Afghanistan is all about resources.
I’ll get back to the “Saudi Arabia of lithium” in
a minute, here’s a brief excerpt from my prior report on
another key resource in the region:
Continue—Costs
