Afghanistan

[SparrowHawk]

Why exactly are we in Afghanistan? Can anyone tell me?

 

[delldude]

Why exactly are we in Afghanistan? Can anyone tell me?

I saw something on frontline or some other venue where the place is loaded with all kinds computer type electronic minerals. And if we can just get those opium freaks to quit killing one another and stop selling dope, they can be exploited by the military industrial complex and George Soros can make loads of money.

They looking at troops there for another decade.

Despite pledging on numerous occasions that the U.S. government’s occupation of Afghanistan would end in 2014 with the withdrawal of American forces, the Obama administration is now finalizing a controversial scheme to potentially keep tens of thousands of soldiers and an undisclosed number of mercenaries there for a decade or more. Critics, even among supporters of the president, are expressing outrage about the revelations.
http://thenewamerican.com/usnews/foreign-policy/item/13775-despite-vow-to-withdraw-obama-plans-troops-in-afghanistan-past-2014

 

[delldude]

Why exactly are we in Afghanistan? Can anyone tell me?

Wonder why?? Someone is going to make beau coup bux in Afghanistan and don't think it won't be one of Obama's Pals.
Hence the proposed decade extension of US troops.

U.S. Geologists Discover $1 Trillion in Mineral Deposits in Afghanistan

U.S. geologists have concluded that Afghanistan, one of the world's poorest countries after 30 years of violence and war, lies atop a bonanza of mineral riches that could transform it into a wealthy nation.
The world class deposits of copper, iron ore and some other fairly exotic minerals have been estimated by the U.S. Geological Survey, which has been working to identify resources in Afghanistan, at more than $1 trillion.
But those riches which could help end the country's vicious cycle of poverty and even more vicious cycle of war may remain tantalizingly out of reach over the next few years.

http://abcnews.go.co...07#.UMPrUKywWSo

 

[SparrowHawk]

Wonder why?? Someone is going to make beau coup bux in Afghanistan and don't think it won't be one of Obama's Pals.
Hence the proposed decade extension of US troops.

U.S. Geologists Discover $1 Trillion in Mineral Deposits in Afghanistan




http://abcnews.go.co...07#.UMPrUKywWSo

BINGO! Hold your Cards, We Have a BINGO!

 

[delldude]

Not to make issue of the Afghan KIA's......but with this info......most should see why they shut down one war and extend a seemingly meaningless conflict in another country.
At the expense of our Sons and Daughters.

National Security or big business global profit?

 

[SparrowHawk]

Not to make issue of the Afghan KIA's......but with this info......most should see why they shut down one war and extend a seemingly meaningless conflict in another country.
At the expense of our Sons and Daughters.

National Security or big business global profit?

Now you see why Ron Paul never had a chance against romney, The Banksters and the Military industrial comples

 

[yoyodyne]

Why exactly are we in Afghanistan? Can anyone tell me?

Let me see if I can answer that.... Link

Key events in Afghanistan War:

Oct. 7, 2001 - U.S. and British forces begin airstrikes in Afghanistan after the Taliban refuse to hand over al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, blamed for the 9/11 attacks.

Nov. 13, 2001 - Taliban fighters abandon Kabul after weeks of air assaults. About 1,300 U.S. troops were involved in the offensive.

Dec. 7, 2001 - Taliban stronghold Kandahar falls. Bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar escape.

June 13, 2002 - Hamid Karzai is elected as head of state of a new interim government by the loya jirga, or grand council.

August 2003 - NATO deploys troops to Kabul for a peacekeeping mission. The force later expands to other areas and numbers 11,000. The U.S. has more than 10,000 troops in Afghanistan.

Jan. 4, 2004 - Council of elders ratifies a new constitution, making Afghanistan an Islamic state with a strong president.

Oct. 9, 2004 - Karzai wins Afghanistan's first presidential election.

September 2008 - Extremist attacks have made this the most violent year since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion began, with at least 120 U.S. troop deaths and 104 from other NATO nations. There are now 31,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.​

And so on...

 

[Glenn Quagmire]

Dude, you got to quit listening to those PM's from Ms.Tree.

I receive PM's from no one, that feature is disabled. Not sure what you are implying anyway.

Back to the topic:

Here is an article I found that is not too kind to Obama on this. Pay attentn to the part about copper and metals. This is just a portion of the article. The entire article is here:

http://piperbayard.wordpress.com/2012/12/03/so-why-are-we-in-afghanistan/


So . . . Why ARE We In Afghanistan? Dec 3
by Piper Bayard
By Intelligence Operative Jay Holmes*

"But why have any troops there at all? What’s in it for us? Regional stability perhaps? We don’t live in that region, and our oil fix doesn’t come from Afghanistan.

There are, in fact, some rare metals there that we could use but we’re not taking those. Karzai sold those to China. China is already increasing copper production at an Afghan copper mine and exploring for oil in the Amu Darya basin. And if there’s no oil there? No problem. There are enough natural gas reserves in Afghanistan to keep China happy for a decade or more. So again, why are we there? Why not let China bring “stability” to their neighbor?

Some would argue that the US wants to deny al-Qaeda a base of operations by forcing them out of Afghanistan. Let’s put that in perspective. Al-Qaeda being kicked out of Afghanistan and having to move to Africa, Pakistan, and the Gulf is like inmates being kicked out of Sing-Sing and having to move to Malibu. Al-Qaeda is hardly complaining. In any event, if al-Qaeda sets up a serious infrastructure in Afghanistan again, we can bomb them more easily there than we can bomb them in Pakistan. Pakistan is our “friend,” after all."

 

[delldude]

I think they want the country stabilized to the point where foreign investment and jobs will be developed. There's more minerals there than China can consume...
Besides, China has more than enough armed forces to provide for their own protection if it was needed.

It's what they call rare earth metals.

 

[Glenn Quagmire]

I think china is the leading producer of rare earth minerals. They have a near monopoly on them.

Maybe Afghanistan would break that?

 

[delldude]

I think china is the leading producer of rare earth minerals. They have a near monopoly on them.

Maybe Afghanistan would break that?

Clincher is US has little if any.

 

[southwind]

So with that, why is Obama willing to let troops stay there and not get our boys home?
He's surpassed Bush in KIA's already.....that sucks.
What's there??
Maybe undeveloped high tech mining for exotic minerals vital to our national security???

Shhhh.............We don't want to talk about KIA's under Barrack's watch, that's blasphemy !

 

[Glenn Quagmire]

Clincher is US has little if any.

Actually we do, but China can supply it much cheaper...sound familiar?

Cool article in Popular Mechanic's of all places:

Europium: Savior of the TV Generation

Sir William Crookes, a 19th century British chemist, once wrote that, "rare earth elements perplex us in our researches, baffle us in our speculations and haunt us in our very dreams." These weren't easy elements to isolate or to understand, and so there was a very long lag time between the discovery of the rare earths, and the discovery of practical uses for them.

It didn't help that individual rare earth elements don't occur by their lonesome—they travel in packs. To get one, you have to mine all of them. At first, industry didn't even bother to separate out individual rare earths, instead using them in a blended alloy called mischmetal. This provided the first commercial applications, says Karl Gschneidner, senior metallurgist at the Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory. In 1891, mischmetal became an ingredient in lamp mantles—devices that were hung above open flames, where they burned and produced a bright, white light you could see and work by.

Europium was the first isolated, high purity rare earth element to enter the public marketplace, in 1967, as a source of the color red in TV sets. There had been color TV before europium, but the color quality was weak. The sets relied on phosphors—substances that glow when struck with struck with electrons or other energized particles—to get their red, green and blue colors, and the early red phosphors couldn't produce a very bright color. Europium phosphors made the picture pop.

At the time, rare earth mining wasn't even a twinkle in China's eye. Up until the 1990s, most rare earth elements came from the United States, especially Mountain Pass, a mine in California near Los Angeles, which supplied most of the late 1960s europium demand. By 2003, Mountain Pass had closed and no rare earths were coming out of the United States at all. The problem, though, isn't supply. The U.S. still has plenty of rare earth elements left to mine—in Mountain Pass and elsewhere. Instead, those mines were simply driven out of business, undercut on price by Chinese companies that had lower labor costs, and also benefited from the fact that they were mining rare earth elements as a byproduct of profitable iron mining.

Today, europium is still used as a phosphor, but as cathode ray tube TVs go the way of the dodo, it's more likely to turn up in white LED-based lights, which could someday be an energy efficient replacement for both incandescent and compact fluorescent bulbs. With this technology, white light is produced by mixing various colored LEDs and europium red happens to be an ingredient in turning out a high-quality, attractive shade of white.​

Read more: 4 Rare Earth Elements That Will Only Get More Important - Popular Mechanics​

Current Sources and Domestic Reserves

The United States currently imports all of its rare earth elements (REE) raw materials from foreign sources, prin-cipally China (U.S. Geological Survey, 2010). This has not always been the case. The USGS annually reports global and domestic production and trade in REE in its publications Minerals Yearbook and Mineral Commodity Summaries. Prior to 1998, when production from the Mountain Pass mine in California was curtailed, the United States produced most of the light REE consumed domestically and by free market countries. Heavy REE were obtained from imported monazite concentrates. That changed in the 1980s after China became the dominant global supplier of light and heavy REE (Papp and others, 2008). In 2002, the Mountain Pass mine in California, the sole domestic producer of REE minerals, shut down. Although the mine has continued to produce REE materials from stockpiled raw materials, no new REE ores are being mined. Since then, the United States has obtained all of its REE raw materials from imports, principally from China. China accounts for 95 percent of global REE production despite having only 36 percent of identified world reserves (table 8).

Concentration of Supply

The high concentration of production of REE in one country is not unusual for a minor metal commodity. For example, a single mine in the United States supplies 86 percent of world demand for beryllium and two mines in Brazil account for 92 percent of world niobium production (U.S. Geological Survey, 2010). Such concentration of supply, which has long been of concern in regard to price manipula-tion, also raises issues related to reliability of supply. Given an equal risk of a natural disaster, industrial accident, labor strike, political strife, or anything else that might interrupt produc-tion, a single source of supply is inherently more risky than multiple sources of supply. Even though these various risks are not equal among countries, concentration of supply is a key indicator of mineral-supply risk.Table 9 compares the supply situation of REE with other internationally traded minerals using several measures of con-centration. These measures are used by economists to study market concentration and by regulators for antitrust purposes. In table 9, concentration ratios, abbreviated CR2 and CR3, measure the total percent share in United States imports and world production of the top two or top three supplier coun-tries, respectively. A high percentage, such as the CR2 of 94 percent and CR3 of 96 percent shown for REE (excluding
Table 8. World production and reserves of rare earth elements minerals in 2009.[In 2009, China produced 95 percent of world rare earth elements although it had only 36 percent of rare earth elements reserves. TREO, total metric tons of rare earth oxides]

Full report from the USGS here:

http://pubs.usgs.gov...5220.pdf#page=8

Very interesting stuff that I don't know much about (it's been many years since my Geology Club days in High School). Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I sincerely hope we get something out of Afghanistan after all the $$$ spent and lives lost. It seems like we did not learn much from the Russians.

 

[Glenn Quagmire]

Shhhh.....

Go back down to the basement, the adults are having a conversation.

 

[delldude]

From Wiki.....Tree told me it was cool to use it.

The Mountain Pass rare earth mine is an open-pit mine of rare earth elements (REEs) on the south flank of the Clark Mountain Range and just north of the unincorporated community of Mountain Pass, California, United States. The mine, owned by Molycorp Inc., once supplied most of the world's rare earth elements. The facility is currently undergoing expansion and modernization, and expected to return to full production in 2012.
The mine is owned by Molycorp Minerals LLC, which is a subsidiary of Molycorp Inc..[sup][13][/sup] Molycorp planned to invest $500 million to reopen and expand the mine.[sup][14][/sup] The money was raised through an initial public offering of stock in Molycorp Inc.[sup][15][/sup] Full mining operations were planned to resume by the second half of 2011 as a result of increased demand for rare earth metals.[sup][16][/sup] In December 2010, Molycorp announced that it had secured all the environmental permits needed to begin construction of a new ore processing plant at the mine; construction would begin in January 2011, and was expected to be completed by the end of 2012.[sup][17][/sup] The company announced its resumption of operations on a start-up basis at the Mountain Pass mine on August 27, 2012.[sup][18][/sup]

I read also something about the US REE's were low density and other REE's which are needed are considered high density. Apparently US REE's don't cover all the needs.