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Is it just a new spin on an old story or is this going to be the reason the US military stays there even longer?

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...

In 2004, American geologists...stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s...

Armed with the old Russian charts, the United States Geological Survey began a series of aerial surveys of Afghanistan?s mineral resources in 2006...

The data from those flights was so promising that in 2007, the geologists returned for an even more sophisticated study...

In 2009, a Pentagon task force that had created business development programs in Iraq was transferred to Afghanistan, and came upon the geological data.

or are we just hearing about it now cause the Chinese are coming???

After winning the bid for its Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, China clearly wants more, American officials said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/wo...o_interstitial

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010...afganistan.php