Afghan Mineral Find Boosts Anti-U.S. Conspiracy Theories

To much of the world, the war in Iraq was always about oil.

The evolving casus belli of the George W. Bush administration notwithstanding, conspiracy theorists across the globe and even in the United States saw an American thirst for black gold as the real reason for the U.S.-led invasion and occupation, not the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction or hopes to democratize the Middle East.

Now those same conspiracy-minded doubters are likely to make the same arguments about Afghanistan.

U.S. and Afghan officials tell the New York Times the U.S. Geological Survey -- working from data originally gathered by the Afghans before the Soviet occupation in the 1980s -- found "amazing" deposits of iron, copper, cobalt, gold, lithium and other minerals. Detailed aerial surveys in 2006 and 2007 essentially confirmed the findings, but they gathered dust until last year, when a Pentagon task force came to the country to help develop Afghan business.

In February, Afghan President Hamid Karzai told reporters the USGS determined his government was sitting on some $1 trillion of mineral wealth, but the boast was mostly ignored beyond the mining-focused media in Australia and China.

No one's ignoring it now.

From conspiracy-minded sites in the U.S. like Abovetopsecret.com to the discussions like this one on the French newspaper Le Figaro's rehashing of the Times story, talk of 9/11 or vanquishing al Qaida and the Taliban have given way to insistence that Washington's only interest is fleecing the Afghans.

Said one skeptical poster at Abovetopsecret, "Somehow this doesn't surprise me. Outside of the poppy fields and oil pipeline routs there had to be something that was more valuable in the region. I'm surprised they released this info. I doubt that this is actually a new discovery. It was probably known for years."

In France, where even government ministers feel free to publicly speculate that Bush was behind 9/11, one Figaro reader's conflations went farther: "It's curious that this rumor shows up every time it looks like there's a disagreement among the NATO forces. What's certain is that oil is flowing in the waters off Lousiana, as Obama showed us!"