As those who watch the news on television or follow it online have likely heard, Americans have found a fortune in mineral wealth in Afghanistan, now estimated at somewhere around 807 billion EUR/1 trillion USD/674 billion GBP/over 1 trillion CAD/over 1 trillion AUD/over 91 trillion JPY, I am sure you get the picture.
This is most definitely a disaster in the making. Certainly, this fortune could help the country, but it will most likely harm it instead. This has been the case ever since humanity began looking outside of its own community for resources. Being greedy creatures (particularly those who are delusional with concepts of immortal grandeur), they are not willing to use diplomacy as a first means of gaining access to the resources, but instead prefer to use force, uncaring of the effect such action could have on others. It is only when their actions negatively impact themselves that they even remotely consider cooperation.
Therefore, with this discovery of mineral wealth in a hotly contested area of the world which could help the people within that country, other nations will undoubtedly be eyeing it for their own benefit. Since there is already a war going on there, it will most likely get worse as the Afghan people hope to defend these resources to further their own country's development while other nations will try and take it from them in order to widen the gap between their own development and Afghanistan's. I will not even start discussing the environmental problems which await the exploitation of this discovery, it would make this post far too long.
Let the tug-of-war begin...
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