That isn’t counting gem materials and mineral specimens. Afghanistan has been a well known source for Lapis Lazuli for a very long time.
Who’s going to get it out for them?
Except they will [probably use it for more Jihad since Zero is going to bug out and the Taliban will be back in charge in months...
Yeah, well we have heard this one before and years ago was in the news about us needing to help the Aghanis so we could get our hands on this stuff.
Carpet flyers, camel jockeys and sheep humpers live today as they did 1400 years ago. What fool thinks they can become natural resource miners and join the 21st century world wide financial market?
That’s 1-2 years of funding US government deficit spending in exchange for a whole lot of digging.
Even plate techtonics didn't believe in an equal distribution of the wealth.
Why else start those wars there? The Taliban? LOL!
Our government can print and spend that much money in a few weeks. Who needs minerals?
Poppies pay better and you don’t have to excavate for those.
They wouldn’t know what to do with the wealth. The country would continue to be 4th world with a tiny number of people controlling the new wealth and 98% of the population still enslaved by poverty and Islam.
$1,000,000,000,000.00? Congress can spend that in six months and have nothing to show for it.
THEY’ve been putting this crap out for years.
“No Blood For Minerals!” *SMIRK*
But the poppies growing above are worth more. The US Heroin epidemic nicely correlates with the rise in Afganistan opiate production since around 2003.
“....Afghanistan may be sitting on one of the richest troves of minerals in the world....”
.
Which makes it a prime target for ISIS.
And who will protect those ‘troves of minerals’?
This is like saying the 20 million tons of gold in ocean is worth a quadrillion dollars at $50 million per ton. Extraction costs will be high. Transportation costs will be high. — Afghanistan has no infrastructure. Any mining will go at a fraction of the cost. The Chinese were working on the best copper deposit that they paid something like 20% for, but also had to put in a railroad, security, everything. I’m not sure it’s still going. Afghanistan will be fortunate to net $50 billion.
It should be ours.
Obama could wiz that away in a year. What are we now? 18 Trillion in imaginary money?
There are some real valuable rubies coming from near Kabul. I heard that some troops carried many of them back home and made a few dollars off of them.