[R-G] A new player in Afghanistan's Great Game

[Anthony Fenton]

A new player in Afghanistan's Great Game
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/11/21/china_afghanistan/index.html

In what is being called "the largest foreign investment in  
Afghanistan's history," a Chinese mining company has won the right to  
exploit a huge copper field not far from Kabul, the Financial Times  
reports. The price tag: 3 billion dollars. The spoils: a potential 12  
million tons of copper.

Extracting the copper will be a mighty endeavor for the China  
Metallurgical Group (MCC), which beat out contenders from Russia, the  
U.K., Canada, and the U.S. to win the bid. MCC must first build a  
power plant to provide electricity for the mining operations, and  
simultaneously develop coal resources to fuel the power plant. Excess  
power from the plant will be used to supply Kabul with much-needed  
electricity. Thousands of jobs will reportedly be created, though if  
China's record in Africa is any guide, many of those jobs may be  
filled by Chinese workers, and not Afghanis.

In the context of China's scramble to secure natural resources across  
the globe, the successful multi-year bid is just another data point  
to match up with soybean imports from Brazil, oil from Sudan, and  
liquefied natural gas from Australia. But it's also intriguing from a  
geopolitical perspective. The Great Game first featured England and  
Russia fighting over Afghanistan. Then the Americans replaced the  
Brits, and squared off against the Soviet Union.

Soviet geologists are believed to be the first to have pinpointed  
Afghanistan's copper resources, which have now been confirmed by the  
United States Geological Survey. But China will mine them.

At first glance it's hard to imagine two countries more different  
than China and Afghanistan -- one is the world's emerging superpower,  
the other is the epitome of a failed state. But China and Afghanistan  
actually share a 76 kilometer border, albeit mountainous and  
impassable for much of the year. Afghanistan is believed to be rich  
with a vast variety of mineral resources for which China has a  
seemingly insatiable hunger. And there China is, just a stone's throw  
away.

It is remarkable to think about how the world has and hasn't changed  
since the U.S. started dropping bombs on Afghanistan in the wake of  
9/11. The U.S. remains mired in an apparently endless struggle  
against jihad on multiple fronts. But if it hadn't topped the  
Taliban, would Afghanistan be "safe" for foreign mining companies?  
And while the U.S. spends hundreds of billions of dollars fighting  
its war in Iraq, China spends its currency doing business.