Hitchens's "coalition of the digging" for Afghanistan

Slate piece by Christopher Hitchens by way of Our Man in Kabul.

I like the underlying logic:

This is at least a trillion-dollar national-resource treasure in a country that so far has had a GDP with scarcely any pulse. The governments of NATO—which include countries with vast experience in mining, from Germany to Canada and from Britain to the United States—have had almost no real work to do on the economic front except to distribute aid, itself often a cause of resentment, and waste time trying to "interdict" Afghanistan's only other existing resource, which is opium. Is it conceivable that such an alliance of earth-moving and digging powers could not at last find something genuinely constructive to do in a country where they already have a U.N. mandate for rebuilding and reconstruction? It is true that the Afghan parliament and government have no tradition of oversight, but the parliaments and press and NGOs of the alliance can be pushed to ensure that this is not a mere gouging exercise of the sort in which China likes to engage and that the Afghan people are the main beneficiaries. It seems too good an opportunity to pass up. It also seems like an opportunity far too important to be left in the tender hands of the Taliban.

Hitchens is awfully harsh on China's extractive industries inside the Gap, but his heart is in the right place. Left with little competition, China will do whatever it takes to get the resources out as cheaply as possible, justifying its greed on the basis of those hundreds of millions of impoverished rural folk back home who need a better life (or else!).

So he's basically saying, offer the competition, and use Afghanistan as an incubator of better approaches.

Me, I like this idea plenty, especially Hitchens' tendency to side with India. But I don't want Afghanistan to become an exercise in keeping the Chinese out, but instead make it one of bringing them in under better circumstances, with stronger outcomes.

And, as I've argued here in the past, I agree with the notion of seeing the minerals as a way to speed up regional economic integration as the ultimate means of creating stability vice a Taliban-focused COIN that I believe plays into the enemy's strengths.