Afghanistan has potential, but who will mine it?

Afghanistan is now America's longest war. The fighting this month entered its 104th month and the death toll of US soldiers has reached 1,000. By comparison, US troops in Vietnam fought for 103 months, from 1964, when the US Congress passed a resolution formally launching American involvement, until the last combat troops withdrew in 1973. (In fact, this is not a strictly accurate comparison, as the US sent military advisers to Vietnam as early as 1950 and the fighting ended in 1975 with the fall of Saigon.)

But the Afghan war has captured America's imagination because nine years in, there seems to be little or no progress. Everyone loves talking about Afghanistan as mind-boggling, complicated, unique and without parallel. "A master class of complexity," is how Martin Griffiths, who heads the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, put it at the Oslo Forum this weekend. It is really not. The expectations of ordinary Afghans are fairly low: they want to feed their families, farm their land, have jobs in the cities if they are urban folk and send their sons to schools. They would educate their daughters too - if they felt girls were safe from predatory warlords as they walked to class.

They do not want Nato bombs dropped on their houses and they expect fair justice when they go to court to settle disputes. The urban intelligentsia is keen on democratic rule, but the rural majority doesn't seem particularly interested. After all, no one can expect struggling, illiterate farmers to worry about achieving the ideals of democracy. For a hint at which direction Afghans want their country to follow, one need only look at the registration of candidates for September's parliamentary election. So far, 2,635 candidates have registered, including 400 women. They will easily exceed the quota of 68 seats reserved for female parliamentarians.

Last week, the Pentagon said that the country is sitting on vast reserves of copper, iron ore, rare earth metals and gems. Pentagon officials told The New York Times that their total value was near $1 trillion. It is unclear how they came up with that number. However, various reports by international organisations in the last few years have shown there is indeed an abundance of proven reserves scattered throughout the country, which means it is unlikely that one ethnic group could control resources at the expense of another. Digging may well start in the north, which is relatively stable and has the largest deposits of iron ore in Asia.

But we are not talking about gemstones that could be easily mined and sold by the Taliban or al Qa'eda to fund global jihad. The vast majority of the deposits require multinational mining companies with sophisticated technology to dig deep underground to extract metals such as copper and iron. Western firms may not have the stomach to go anywhere near Afghanistan, but China and India, both hungry for raw materials, have expressed interest.

And despite this discovery and reassurances by the US military, the violence is worsening. A United Nations report submitted to the UN Security Council suggests that insurgent violence was the biggest killer of Afghan civilians in the first four months of this year. Ordinary Afghans are caught between militants who want to keep the country violent and US-led Nato forces who appear to blunder from one civilian air strike to another.

There are now three suicide bombings a week, and one assassination every day. Indeed, the report suggests that the targeted killing of Afghan officials has risen by 45 per cent and suicide bombings have increased by 94 per cent compared with the same period last year. Assassins are killing moderate mullahs, teachers, doctors, aid workers and civil servants. They are burning down schools. If it was a broad and popular insurgency - as many detractors of the war claim - what would be the point of killing the educated people who would be required to build the country once foreigners left? What's the point of attacking a school full of children?

Afghanistan does have potential. It only needs national leaders and western politicians with the guts and vision to realise what it could be. Until then, we may have to be content with counting the months and the conflict's grisly death toll. [e-mail]