barack obama's excellent adventure -- updated

It never occurred to me that if we just loitered in Afghanistan long enough we'd eventually find a reason to be there. From the New York Times, via Atrios:

Headline: U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

Wait! Did you say lithium? By some bizarre coincidence, that's the stuff we need to run the next generation of cars. We need it for the batteries, now that we've decided it would be best to get rid of BP and the rest of those old-fashioned, rude, embarrassing grease monkeys and that dirty, messy crude oil they're always spilling all over the place and telling us we can't live without. Who needs them, the way they ruin the neighborhood?

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

And cars. Don't forget the cars!

So forget Iraq and Exxon-Mobil and BP. It's on to Afghanistan, and our brand-new relationship with a brand-new set of Lithium gazillionaires, the Karzai Brothers LLC.

Update: The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder debunks this "OMG this is an incredible scoop" type story. Thanks, Atrios.