Afghanistan, War, and Money

An interesting development:

A series of recent news stories has deeply damaged the Obama administration's case for continued patience with U.S.-led counterinsurgency campaign, which has shown little discernable progress despite the best efforts tens of thousands of additional American troops and an all-star lineup of top military officers.

First, let's talk about Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president. Remember the chatter earlier this year about how he'd gone crazy, threatening to join the Taliban and all that? That discussion died down a little after Karzai checked all the right boxes during his May visit to Washington.

Then came the "peace jirga" -- after which Karzai abruptly fired his intelligence and interior ministers, reputed to be two of the most competent members of his cabinet (technically, they resigned). The intelligence minister, Amrullah Saleh, told his side of the story Friday in a jaw-dropping interview with the Times. According to Saleh, Karzai no longer believes the West can win the war and is looking to cast his lot with Pakistan and the Taliban; an unnamed source told the paper that Karzai had suggested that the Americans had carried out a rocket attack on the peace jirga. Karzai has apparently also asked the United Nations to remove Mullah Omar from a key U.N. blacklist.

Next came revelations that Pakistan's powerful military intelligence agency, the ISI, is still deeply involved with the Afghan Taliban (yeah, blow me over with a feather) despite heated denials to the contrary.

Meanwhile, the drive for Kandahar looks to be stalled in the face of questionable local support for Karzai's government, the Taliban is killing local authorities left and right, and the corruption situation has apparently gotten so bad that the U.S. intelligence community is now keeping tabs on which Afghan officials are stealing what.

In short, things don't look good for the United States ... which makes me suspicious of the timing of this attention-grabbing James Risen story in the Times, which opens with this mind-boggling lede:

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials."

Wow! Talk about a game changer. The story goes on to outline Afghanistan's apparently vast underground resources, which include large copper and iron reserves as well as hitherto undiscovered reserves lithium and other rare minerals.

Read a little more carefully, though, and you realize that there's less to this scoop than meets the eye.