Afghan Gold

The new and improved graveyard of empires, now with untold hoards of commodities!  Who will gain this treasure?  Who can afford to?  Afghanistan has no mining infrastructure or tradition so any victor faces a large capital and temporal investment before any profit.  Years of blood before any gold.  And now that commodities are involved resource hungry China is going to get further involved in one of its border states.   We can also look forward to another gigantic plague of corruption upon the Afghani people as the extractive industries are riddled with a culture of bribery and kickbacks, to say nothing of the Afghani government.