DailyChatter: Blue tragedy in Afghanistan

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Blue Tragedy

For years, the international community has watched as Afghanistan has failed to leverage its mineral riches to bring prosperity to its 30.5 million people.

Six years ago, the United States announced the discovery of $1 trillion worth of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and lithium on Afghan territory. It wasn’t really a surprise. Soviet miners had discovered signs of the deposits before the Americans. Later, the Afghan government pegged the geological trove at $3 trillion. That could pay for a lot of hospitals, schools and highways.

But a lack of railroads and squabbles with Chinese mining concerns have hampered efforts to transport and export the stuff. Last year, the Afghan government revealed that it expected to earn around $30 million from minerals rather than the $1.5 billion that had been forecast. The Taliban, meanwhile, was estimated to be conducting as many as 10,000 small-scale mining operations throughout the Central Asian country.

Now it turns out things are worse than many imagined.

The Taliban and other militants have taken over a lapis lazuli mine whose profits have been helping the Islamic militants in their quest to defeat the United States-allied government in Kabul and impose a radical theocracy on Afghanistan, Global Witness, a London-based human rights and justice NGO, said on Monday.

“The mines of the rugged northeastern province of Badakhshan are one of the richest assets of the Afghan people, an extraordinary national treasure that should be a powerful resource for development,” the group said. “Instead…they are a major source of conflict and grievance, supply millions of dollars of funding to armed groups, insurgents, and strongmen, and provide a tiny fraction of the benefit they should to the Afghan people.”

Prized by pharaohs and symbolic of love and purity, lapis lazuli generates around $125 million a year for Afghanistan. The Lajwardeen Mining Company that purchased the Badakhshan mine three years ago hoped to earn at least that much from their new operation. Instead, after the company purchased the mine, local militiamen seized it.

Now the mine is case study in corruption in a country that continues to cost Afghan lives as well as American casualties and taxpayer dollars.

One local strongman backs the mining company. Another is linked to the militia that took the mine. The New York Timesreported that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani appears to be siding with the second militia.

The Taliban, meanwhile, are squeezing the second strongman for a cut of the lapis lazuli in exchange for leaving the mine alone. They’re receiving around $6 million a year. So President Ghani is helping a local leader who is funding the Taliban.

Meanwhile, the Taliban could take the mine any day now and all its precious stones, says Global Witness: “In the competition over the mines, they are emerging as the real winners.”

WANT TO KNOW

Mexico: A Vote That Stings

Mexico's ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), took a beating in regional elections Monday, when voters send PRI leaders packing in six states – including four that had been PRI strongholds for the past 80 years.

Instead voters voiced support for the center-right opposition party, the National Action Party (PAN), who have now entered government in several states.

It's a stinging defeat for President Enrique Pena Nieto, who has been criticized for his failures to clamp down on corruption and gang violence – in two of the Gulf Coast states that held elections, kidnapping and extortion have reached alarming levels, and drug cartels are said to operate with impunity.

The results of the regional elections have also set the tone for Mexico's presidential election in 2018 – themes are likely to include resentment over a struggling economy and ongoing corruption scandals — an opened the races to high-level candidates outside the PRI.

Panama Papers, American Money

Documents have begun surfacing on wealthy Americans who used the services of Mossack Fonsenca, the law firm at the center of the ongoing Panama Papers scandal, to store fortunes and other assets offshore.

Until now, the Panama Papers has shied away from naming individual Americans, leading many puzzled as to how the world's wealthiest country and the home of Wall Street steered clear off any entanglements in the scandal.

But a New York Times investigation found that Mosscak Fonseca set up at least 2,800 shell companies in Panama and beyond for its 2,400 US-based clients looking to hide wealth. In doing so, Mossack Fonseca "offered a how-to-guide on skirting or evading US tax and financial disclosure laws."

Their advice included using straw men in "tax-convenient" jurisdictions to hide the true American owner of an account, or encouraging dual nationals to use their non-US passport to open accounts and avoid regulatory scrutiny.

So it looks like Americans were having fun down in Panama after all.

Of Bombs and Madmen

Ukrainian authorities said that they arrested a Frenchman last month who possessed "a large cache of arms" and was planning an attack during the EURO 2016 soccer tournament, which kicks off Friday.

The suspect, 25-year-old Gregoire Moutaux, was planning 15 attacks and driven by ultra-nationalist views, said Ukrainian intelligence officials. Moutaux is now being prosecuted for terrorism and arms smuggling – his stash of weapons included guns, detonators and 125 kg of TNT, police said.

Moutaux's possible targets included bridges, motorways, mosques and synagogues. But Paris police deny say it's unclear whether Moutaux was targeting the tournament itself, noting there was "no specific threat against any Euro 2016 site".

DISCOVERIES

Editing Life Itself

The brave new world of DNA editing is promising to change the human race.

Developed a few years ago, “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” or CRISPR, repeats the way bacterium identify, replicate and destroy the DNA of viruses, according to the BBC. Scientists in labs can now do the same, allowing them to insert, delete or repair damaged DNA – the building block of life itself.

CRISPR gives researchers the tools not only to study genetic diseases but opportunities to trigger cell mutations that produce variations that might provide insights or even cures into ailments like blindness, cancer and immunodeficiency disorders.

The technique has already reversed leukemia in a British patient last year. In California, it helped a 55-year-old HIV/AIDS patient get off antiretroviral medication for two years.

Researchers are experimenting on growing human organs in pigs by tweaking DNA sequences in the animals, potentially paving the way for mass bioengineering and manufacturing of organs.

Ethicists are now debating whether editing human embryos is appropriate or not. One could foresee editing that saves a child who might be born paralyzed. But what about wealthy individuals who seek to edit their kids to be stronger, more intelligent and taller than average? The debates of the future are already here.