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Geopolitics..what else...


So, the question for many observers was why the article, which dominated much of the foreign news in the network and cable broadcast media during Monday's news cycle, was published now?

The Pentagon memo may have been an effort to attract international interest in the mining sector before the auction in the next few weeks of the 1.8 billion-ton iron-ore field in Ha***ak, which could be worth $5 billion to $6 billion, according to the British-based Times. The development of the country's largest known iron deposit has been hampered by the war and weak institutions.

The memo coincided with a visit to India by Wahidullah Shahrani, the new Afghan minister of mines, to solicit bids for Ha***ak after a planned tender was canceled last year because of a lack of international interest, the Times reported. Shahrani was appointed with US backing in January after his predecessor was sacked for allegedly taking bribes from a Chinese mining company - a charge he denies.

Afghan and Western officials want more companies to bid for Ha***ak and other deposits to prevent China from gaining control over Afghanistan’s natural resources through bids subsidized heavily by Beijing, the Times said. American and European companies have alleged that underhand methods were used by Beijing to get contracts, it said.

China’s state-owned Metallurgical Corp of China won a license in 2007 to develop the Aynak copper field, Afghanistan's richest known deposit of the metal, where mining had been blocked by war in the 1980s, Bloomberg reported. The deposit holds 11 million tons of copper metal, according to a 2008 statement from Jiangxi Copper, a partner in the project, cited by Bloomberg.

The existence of the minerals also raises questions about foreign motives for involvement in the Afghan conflict. Afghans have complained that the West is really after its natural resources, just as many Iraqis contended that the US invasion of their country was about controlling the oil wealth (115 billion barrels of proven reserves, third in the world after Saudi Arabia and Iran).

The New York Times' Risen suggested an answer in his story to the question of the timing of the Pentagon memo, noting "American and Afghan officials agreed to discuss the mineral discoveries at a difficult moment in the war in Afghanistan".

Indeed, US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) casualties have risen sharply in recent weeks; a four-month-old counter-insurgency offensive to "clear, hold and build" in the strategic region around Marjah in Pashtun-dominated Helmand province appears to have stalled badly; and a planned campaign in and around the critical city of Kandahar has been delayed for at least two months.

The latest polling shows a noticeable erosion of support for Washington's commitment to the war compared to eight months ago, when President Barack Obama agreed to the Pentagon's recommendations to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan to bring the total US military presence there to around 100,000 later this summer.

Moreover, what little support for the war remains among the publics of Washington's NATO allies - never as high as in the US in any event - is also fading quickly. NATO and non-NATO countries, excluding the US, currently have about 34,000 troops deployed to Afghanistan.

On the eve of a NATO ministerial conference in Brussels last week, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates warned that Washington and its NATO allies had very little time to convince their publics that their strategy against the Taliban was working - a message that has since been strongly echoed by the coalition's commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, and by Petraeus.

Indeed, the administration is committed to a major review of its strategy in Afghanistan at the end of the year, and Obama has pledged to begin withdrawing US troops in July 2011.

Obama is already coming under pressure from right-wing and neo-conservative media - some of which have been cultivated by Petraeus, in particular - and Republican lawmakers to delay that date.

That view was seconded last week by former Petraeus aide, Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl (retired), a counter-insurgency specialist who is now president of the influential Center for a New American Security.

Nagl worked closely with Petraeus in authoring the much-lauded 2006 US Counter-Insurgency Field Manual, which stressed the importance of efforts to influence media perceptions in any counter-insurgency campaign.

"The media directly influence the attitude of key audiences toward counter-insurgents, their operations and the opposing insurgency," they wrote. "This situation creates a war of perceptions between insurgents and counter-insurgents conducted continuously using the news media."

In that respect, the appearance of the Times story on Monday looked to many observers like part of an effort to strengthen the case for giving the counter-insurgency effort more time.

In an interview with Politico's Laura Rozen on Monday, former Afghan finance minister Ashraf Ghani said he had commissioned the assessment of Afghanistan's mineral wealth. "As to why it came out today ... I cannot explain," he said.

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