In this Taliban stronghold in the mountains south of Kabul, the US Army is providing the security that will enable China to exploit one of the world's largest unexploited deposits of copper...
A Western official, who asked not to be further identified so he could speak freely, [said] 'We expect to see more such competitions' over Afghanistan's huge untapped reserves of natural resources...
The site was discovered by an Afghan-Soviet team in 1974. However in the face of armed resistance during their 1979-89 occupation of Afghanistan, the Soviets were never able to develop the site or harvest the ore...
China may hope that the Aynak deal will help position it to compete for more projects in Afghanistan, where three tectonic plates converge. The region is thought to hold some of the world's last major untapped deposits of iron, copper, gold, uranium, precious gems and other raw materials.
'It's the last frontier,' said the second Western official.
The US Geological Survey estimates that Afghanistan also has more than 1.5 billion barrels of oil -- almost untapped since soldiers of Alexander the Great discovered pools of oil in the north more than 2,000 years ago -- and 15 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
