http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-02-02/afghanistan-to-scrap-iron-mine-bids-over-transparency-issues.html

In other news, we may be headed for a spike in iron ore prices – a resource found in abundance in Afghanistan.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raymond-j-learsy/iron-ore-fall-into-the-cr_b_526438.html

Perfect time to claim those mining contracts?

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MAD201A.html

Something on the minerals that are currently exciting to business interests:

http://www.pajhwok.com/viewstory.asp?lng=eng&id=27383

and a wiki quote on mineral reserves:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan#cite_note-Eurasianet-28

“The country’s natural resources include gold, silver, copper, zinc, and iron ore in the Southeast; precious and semi-precious stones (such as lapis, emerald, and azure) in the Northeast; and potentially significant petroleum and natural gas reserves in the North. The country also has uranium, coal, chromite, talc, barites, sulfur, lead, and salt.[1][26][27][28] However, these significant mineral and energy resources remain largely untapped, due to the effects of the Soviet invasion and the subsequent civil war. Plans are under way to begin extracting them in the near future.[29][30]”

Regarding the tribal restrictions on women etc, I wasn’t suggesting that the unfreedoms of tribalism and democracy are in any way equivalent. Just that having lived in many different parts of the world I have come to accept that imposing our Western notion of democracy on peoples who have an entirely different world view is by no means an unalloyed benefit. Our system has evolved over centuries to suit our worldview and has been and is being continually fought for and over. Transplanting that system onto peoples with no such history and no means to assimilate that system is ludicrous–but it functions well as a tool of exploitation and oppression.

I’m a Brit and have benefited from my own country’s colonial expansionism and empire–there is no doubt that empire was built on exploitation and opression for commercial gain.

Thanks for adding your perspective here. It looks like I may have downplayed the economic incentive. Can you recommend some good resources that provide further detail about mining rights in Afghanistan?

The intention of spreading democracy to Afghanistan isn’t presented as central to the mission there, unlike the Iraq War. At least that’s my perception of the media coverage, for what it’s worth. In this war, the purported focus is the security of Americans and non-Taliban Afghans. Hence, the need for so many U.S. troops on the ground. Maybe the switch in rhetorical focus from democracy to security took place after it became apparent that the elections there were rigged.

A small note on Taliban tribal society in Afghanistan: They also tend to be extremely ethnocentric, anti-woman, authoritarian, and cult-like in their religious fervor. The comparison between their tribal society’s lack of freedom and Western society’s lack of freedom isn’t even close.

Apparently there is. Those barren hills are chockful of obscure elements that are now in great demand in modern technology. Hamid Karzai was in the pay of US corporate and military interests to secure the mining rights long before the West waded into Afghanistan and has clearly been moved from being just a business interest to being the political player he now is.
I don’t go much for conspiracy theories, follow the money makes more sense to me using Occam’s razor, so it looks to me as if the terrorism, bringing development and democracy to a backward people, are red herrings.
The Afghans are tribal and have consistently shown a lack of interest in democracy, they defeated the Brits in the 19th century, the Russians in the 20th. They rather like their barren hills and most are not looking forward to the strip mining that will desecrate their ancestral lands. Elevating the greedy, such as Karzai, to political power is just a stepping stone for the Western commercial interests to override the Afghan desire to abjure the ‘benefits’ of democracy.
Tribal people are not free, they live under the tribal restrictions–what we in the west often overlook is the con that democracy gives us freedom. Our ‘freedom’ can be more deceptive than the tribal lack of freedom for most of us do not recognise the extent to which we are conned and manipulated on a daily basis by the commercial interests built into our cultural conditioning.