British forces are primarily in Afghanistan to prevent Afghanistan becoming a safe haven and training area from which attacks on the West can be launched by Islamist terrorists, including, but by no means restricted to, al Qaeda.
In broad terms, in order to achieve that aim, they must train and hand over control of the country to Afghan security forces. For Afghan security forces to be able to do that requires a stable independent Afghan government. 'Independent' meaning not seen to be merely a puppet government placed and held in power by western governments. For that to happen any Afghan government has to be able to raise sufficient tax revenue to fund is own administration, including at least the pay packets of its own military.
At the moment economically Afghanistan is a very long way from being in that position. Senior civil servants and judges have had to drive taxis on their days off just to meet basic living costs. Afghans are fantastic at developing small scale enterprises employing a handful of people, but the country lacks major industries. Consequently, the government has only minuscule amounts of tax revenue coming in.
That is why the discovery of quite how vast Afghanistan’s potential mineral resources are is so incredibly important. Surveys by US geologists suggest the country may have one trillion dollars of mineral reserves. Afghanistan has always known it had significant mineral resources, the country has had a ministry of mines and industry for many years. It has long been known that it had reserves of copper and iron. The country has also been famous for its lapis lazuli, a deep cobalt blue stone, possibly even supplied to King Solomon, while other gem stones such as tourmaline and aquamarine are found in its Hindu Kush mountains. However, it now appears that it may have some of the world’s largest reserves of iron and copper and may rival Bolivia as the world’s largest supplier of lithium, as well as having gold and other rare metals. It is the vast extent of ore deposits such as these that gives just a glimmer of hope for Afghanistan’s long term economic future. A future that could potentially allow the Afghan government to in at least some measure become much more independent of the West than it currently is; a future that could allow the government to actually do something for its own people in terms of financing its own schools, hospitals and roads – as well as military.
It is this aspect that provides the real glimmer of hope. Ask Afghans in the provinces what they feel about the various governments they have had over the last 50 years and occasionally someone will say that the ‘Daud’ government was good. Daud was the king’s cousin who in 1973 overthrew the monarchy creating a republic with himself as the prime minister. What people remember him for is not his regicide, but the fact that he did things to improve life in the provinces – such as building roads where they had not existed before. In the long term it is the ability of an Afghan government both to be seen by its citizens as independent of foreign control – and that includes independent of both Pakistan and Iran as well as the West – and to be seen to be actually doing something that helps the lives of at least some of its ordinary people, it is these which will win hearts and minds and stand at least a credible chance of creating political stability in Afghanistan.
However, the road to this point will be no easy one. The Taliban will seek to hijack and control any significant profitable activity – just as they did with the poppy trade. Afghanistan will require significant foreign investment, however, the public face of mining operations needs to be very clearly to be Afghan. Equally, security for the mines must be provided by Afghan security forces, as any western military presence would give credibility to a well rehearsed Islamist claim that western powers ‘occupy’ Islamic countries to steal their wealth. Corruption, which is endemic in the whole region will be another huge issue. Nor should we forget that the Pashtuns of southern Afghanistan, where much of the gold reserves appear to be traditionally fight over three things – in Pushtu Zan, Zar and Zamin – women, gold and land.
Nonetheless, the discovery of these large reserves of minerals does create at least a glimmer of hope that economic,and ultimately political, stability can come to Afghanistan. That in itself will not defeat Islamist terrorists driven by an ideology that tells them they must ‘invite’ the world to submit to Islamic government and shariah and seek to impose these by means of violent jihad on all who decline their invitation. However, it can potentially create a situation where there is a stable, independent Afghan government, that understands it is in its own economic and political interests not to tolerate terrorists intent on exporting their own version of radical Islamism to other countries. It can potentially create a situation, which, as I have previously argued on Centre Right, would allow the West to encourage more liberal influences to be nurtured particularly in Kabul and other urban areas in the hope that such influences, not least in terms of western style schooling (in contrast to the alternative Islamic maktub and madrassasystem which the Taliban emerged from), may slowly begin to permeate out to the rest of the country, something that is a realistic political aim in the medium term for British foreign policy towards Afghanistan.
