Marc Ambinder and Blake Hounsell think the Afghan minerals story might be part of an Obama administration PR program.

Here’s Ambinder:

The way in which the story was presented — with on-the-record quotations from the Commander in Chief of CENTCOM, no less — and the weird promotion of a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense to Undersecretary of Defense suggest a broad and deliberate information operation designed to influence public opinion on the course of the war. Indeed, as every reader of Jared Diamond’s popular works of geographic determinism knows well, a country rich in mineral resources will tend toward stability over time, assuming it has a strong, central, and stable government.
[. . .]
The general perception about the war here and overseas is that the counterinsurgency strategy has failed to prop up Hamid Karzai’s government in critical areas, and is destined to ultimately fail. This is not how the war was supposed to be going, according to the theorists and policy planners in the Pentagon’s policy shop.
What better way to remind people about the country’s potential bright future — and by people I mean the Chinese, the Russians, the Pakistanis, and the Americans — than by publicizing or re-publicizing valid (but already public) information about the region’s potential wealth?
The Obama administration and the military know that a page-one, throat-clearing New York Times story will get instant worldwide attention. The story is accurate, but the news is not that new; let’s think a bit harder about the context.

And here’s Hounshell:

Meanwhile, the drive for Kandahar looks to be stalled in the face of questionable local support for Karzai’s government, the Taliban is killing local authorities left and right, and the corruption situation has apparently gotten so bad that the U.S. intelligence community is now keeping tabs on which Afghan officials are stealing what.
In short, things don’t look good for the United States … which makes me suspicious of the timing of this attention-grabbing James Risen story in the Times. . . .
Wow! Talk about a game changer. The story goes on to outline Afghanistan’s apparently vast underground resources, which include large copper and iron reserves as well as hitherto undiscovered reserves lithium and other rare minerals.
Read a little more carefully, though, and you realize that there’s less to this scoop than meets the eye. For one thing, the findings on which the story was based are online and have been since 2007, courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey. More information is available on the Afghan mining ministry’s website, including a report by the British Geological Survey (and there’s more here). You can also take a look at the USGS’s documentation of the airborne part of the survey here, including the full set of aerial photographs.
[. . .]
Don’t get me wrong. This could be a great thing for Afghanistan, which certainly deserves a lucky break after the hell it’s been through over the last three decades.
But I’m (a) skeptical of that $1 trillion figure; (b) skeptical of the timing of this story, given the bad news cycle, and (c) skeptical that Afghanistan can really figure out a way to develop these resources in a useful way. It’s also worth noting, as Risen does, that it will take years to get any of this stuff out of the ground, not to mention enormous capital investment.

In one way, at least, Ambinder is obviously right. By its very nature, a story like this couldn’t be “news.” This isn’t Jed Clampett popping off his scattergun at a gopher and discovering Texas Tea. The “discovery” of vast mineral resources in a number of geographically distinct sites scattered across the country isn’t the sort of story that “breaks” over the course of hours or days. Rather, it moves at the speed of, well, at the speed of rocks. As Ambinder himself notes elsewhere in his post, the Soviets knew Afghanistan might be a jackpot way back in 1985, and the Bush administration was already building-in the political economy of mineral discoveries into its Afghanistan policy in 2007.

So no, this isn’t “news” news, but that doesn’t necessarily make it hand-fed from the Obama administration. Perhaps I’m being credulous here, but the sourcing and timing of the story, and the fact that there is now at least a rough dollar-figure — $1 trillion — attached to the cache could just as likely indicate that what were heretofore diffuse bits of information and speculation have now cohered, reached a critical mass and crossed over from abstract-future-opportunity to bona-fide-policy-challenge.