We are looking at a repeat of the US-Soviet conflict, replayed in Central Asia, with stakes unimaginably high.

The mineral deposits are significant in that they are a major catalyst, forcing events to happen over years rather than decades. The minerals will pull in corporations controlled directly by the Chinese state, and our own psuedo-public conglomerates such as Betchel and Halliburton. As a rule, soldiers follow merchants. It is a potentially dangerous situation that is strongly foreshadowed by historical precedent.

There is a reason nearly all Eurasian empires of the past two millennia have found themselves fighting in the Afghan hills.

Afghanistan is not some simple backwater. It sits astride the only viable land passes between Europe, China, and India. It is the natural crossroads of the world, the only unsecured military path into the Punjab, and a major potential trade route between three billion consumers.

Afghanistan is unique because it could be phenomenally wealthy, but as a result, it is simply too dangerous for any one power to allow a rival to control it. The Brits invaded to keep it away from the Russians. The United States sponsered insurgents to keep it away from the Soviets.

The most stable outcome is for no one to possess it, and for the country to remain in ruin. But from time to time, a Great Power tries to seize the area, drawing a response from the other powers. That time may be again be approaching.

That struck me as the most important comment regarding this article.

The Taliban seem to have the organizational resources to rule a country. Wouldn't a Taliban ascendancy in Afghanistan also be a "stable" outcome in the short term? (There would be concern that their ideology would prevent stability in the long term, given the existence of Israel and secular western industrial powers.)

However non-traditional warfare like the Cold War is similarly completely out of the question. The Cold War dragged on for so long because the USA and USSR were economically independent of each other, they both had mega-quantities of resources and production in their respective regions of control. They couldn't fight outright, but they had enough resources to supply everyone else to do the fighting.

Yet the US-Chinese economies are so intrinsically connected that a war would cause immediate trade embargoes between the countries and would cause an all-out collapse of the respective economies. US desperately relies on Chinese manufacturing for everything from what we wipe our arses with to our knives, computers and even a large part of our ship production (civilian and military production both reside squarely within China's region of control). Similarly China relies wholly on US and European dollars to even have a sustainable economy.

We're not talking $1 trillion in cold hard cash likes some uber-lottery, we're talking a likely payout over the next 50-100+ years. It would be more advantageous for China and the US to team up to extract the resources than to even think about arguing over them.

Review the precedent. The argument that economic linkage would prevent warfare was first raised prior to World War I. Global and Continental trade failed to prevent proxy conflict in Africa, the Baltics, and all out conflict across all of Europe. Britain and Germany had a level of trade and codependent exchange far greater that of modern day China and the United States.

Not to mention that the United States and China have fought and are continuing to fight proxy conflict today in the Sudan, northern India, Vietnam, Burma, Thailand, and North Korea.

Your theory has been tested. It is false.

To assume that the United States and China simply cannot engage in warfare is a dangerous delusion. And I assure you, it is not a delusion shared by the Chinese government.

The U.S. deployment wasn’t intended to protect the Chinese investment - the largest in Afghanistan’s history - but to strangle Taliban infiltration into the capital of Kabul. But if the mission provides the security that a project to revive Afghanistan’s economy needs, the synergy will be welcome.

http://www.sananews.com.pk/english/2009/03/08/chinas-thirst-...

From the minerals described, it would actually give Afghanistan the potential to be a haven for technology manufacture, which can easily be stepped into full out tech-based economy.