Afghanistan Times
Related Articles
AT
Kabul: SIGAR, the US Special Inspector General for the Afghanistan Reconstruction, has said in a new report that the US project failed after 17 years of effort and investment worth millions of dollars to develop and build capacity in the mining sector in Afghanistan.
According to this office, since 2002, America had spent more than 962 million dollars to attract investment in Afghanistan’s mining sector.
US hoped that the previous governments could reduce the dependence of the Afghan government on foreign aid by extracting mines. However, SIGAR says that previous afghan governments could not achieve this goal due to “corruption and illegal mining” and “lack of mining infrastructure” in Afghanistan.
SIGAR added that after 17 years of efforts and investments worth millions of dollars, the US government could not solve the many challenges facing the development of Afghanistan’s mines, and its achievements in this sector were insignificant and unsustainable.
Although the US Geological Survey estimated the value of Afghanistan’s mines at $3 trillion, few companies were willing to invest in Afghanistan in this field. However, Chinese companies were the showed interest in investing but they also refused to start mining for “security reasons”.
The officials of the Chinese company MSC, which won the Aynak copper mining contract in 2007, promised once again that they would start the mining, but they did not specify a date for the start of their work.
