Afghanistan: Mining Their Way out of War

By Wolf Blaser Jr.

Afghanistan has been at war for decades. No matter who the resilient Afghans are fighting, they are determined to protect their beloved country. Now years after American troops began arriving, the war on terror is still being carried out by the US military.

It is the summer of 2020 and renowned geologists Tom Vance and Rachel Collins have been working in Seoul, South Korea, monitoring the Ring of Fire. But all of that is about to change when an official at the state department asks Tom and Rachel to travel to Afghanistan to gather mineral samples and determine if it is viable to set up mining operations there. When Tom and Rachel arrive, the country is still plagued by battles. But before large scale mining operations can begin, Tom and Rachel must uncover hidden plans and seek justice for corrupt US mining executives who desire a much different outcome for themselves, their company, and the Afghan people.

Afghanistan continues the tale of two energetic geologists as they arrive in Afghanistan to launch mining operations they hope will bring positive change and help the war-weary country become financially stable.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Mar 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781480889101

Wolf Blaser Jr.

Wolf Blaser Jr. is the author of Disturbing the Ring of Fire. He currently resides in Topeka, Kansas. Afghanistan is the second book in a series.

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Copyright © 2020 Wolf Blaser Jr.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-8909-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-8910-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020904504

Archway Publishing rev. date:  03/05/2020

Contents

Chapter 1     Afghanistan’s Nine-Year War with the Soviet Union

Chapter 2     The Current War with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda

Chapter 3     The Secret Mercenary Operation

Chapter 4     Tom Vance’s and Rachel Collins’s Meeting with the State Department

Chapter 5     Mineral Testing in Afghanistan

Chapter 6     USSR Mining Company Involvement

Chapter 7     Uncovering MAZ Mining Secret Operation

Chapter 8     The Truth Is Revealed

Chapter 9     MAZ Mining Indicted for Secret Operations

Chapter 10   Poppy Fields Are Diminished—Government in Turmoil

Chapter 11   Working with the Afghanistan Government on a Plan

Chapter 12   Mining Starts—Afghan People Are Put to Work

Chapter 13   Once Poppy Farms Now Mining Contracts

Chapter 14   Afghan Rebel Fighters Start Mining

Chapter 15   Afghanistan Schools, Roads, and Hospitals Constructed

Chapter 16   Illegal Opium Production Decreases

Chapter 17   US Troops Pull Out—Afghanistan Stable

Chapter 18   Afghanistan of the Future

About the Author

Chapter 1

Afghanistan’s Nine-Year War

with the Soviet Union

T he nine-year war between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan started at the end of 1979. The Soviet Union mobilized tanks, helicopters, and many troops and crossed the northern border of Afghanistan. They were trying to achieve a complete takeover of the country.

What the Soviet Union did not realize at the time was how resilient the Afghan people were and how much they would do to protect the country. Starting out with a few pockets of resistance, the mujahideen rebels eventually numbered in the thousands to fight the Soviet Union.

The weapons they had were somewhat outdated and were not effective against the Soviet tanks and helicopters. The mujahideen’s determination to win the war was their main driver; they considered dying in battle the ultimate sacrifice.

There were victories over tanks and personnel carriers caused by explosive devices buried on roads, but the mujahideen were not getting the victories they needed to push the Soviets back across the border. What they needed was help, and that came from the United States.

Through the CIA, the US started to arm the mujahideen with the latest weapons. The fighters got surface-to-air missiles and antitank weapons such as mines and rockets. The US could not be identified as helping the fighters, so the weapons were funneled through different countries. If a fighter was captured, the rocket system or weapon would not be linked to the US, which definitely did not want a war with the Soviet Union.

The new weapons turned small victories into large ones as more tanks and helicopters were destroyed. By then, the mujahideen were fighting the Soviet Union at several locations. With their knowledge of the terrain, the mujahideen could hide out in mountains caves.

A couple of years into the war, the Soviet Union had strongholds in some of Afghanistan’s cities. Several convoys arrived in the city of Kabul bringing not military equipment but drilling equipment. They set up a base of operations in Kabul, where they installed equipment to test samples they brought up from underground. On the sides of the equipment was the name USSR Mining; that was a state-controlled company based in Moscow. The civilian team was accompanied by Soviet military for protection.

The person in charge of USSR Mining in Afghanistan was Viktor Sokolov, a twenty-five-year-old executive with a background in geology from the state university in Moscow. He was the executive in charge of Afghan operations, and he had a team of eight Soviets with him to help with the testing.

One area on the outskirts of Kabul was the first location for their testing. They drilled ten holes in an area roughly one square mile and used excavators in five locations to dig a larger hole to a depth of about twenty feet. With the drilling equipment they were using, they could drill to a hundred feet.

At each location, samples were extracted and sent to the base of operations in Kabul for testing. Two of the eight-member team ran tests and calculations on the materials.

After the completion of the drilling and digging outside Kabul, six of the eight-member team loaded up the equipment on trucks and set out for Qandahar, a city in southern Afghanistan. As had Kabul, that city had been taken over by the Soviet Union. The drive to Qandahar took roughly eleven hours because though they were traveling on paved roads, they could drive only about forty-five miles an hour.

They arrived in Qandahar, drove to the testing location, set up camp, and slept with the intent of starting the operations in the morning. As in Kabul, there was always a military presence with the team.

The next morning, they unloaded the equipment and started the drilling and excavating. The area was again about one square mile, and they drilled the same number of holes. They performed the work with precision and in a way that was precisely calculated in terms of the amount of time needed to dig each hole to the total amount of time at the location.

Initial tests at the site showed there was gold in the ground. They put the material they extracted in a pan with large holes. This sieving separated the larger material such as rocks from the smaller material. Performing this task with smaller holes in the pan then yielded small quantities of minerals including gold nuggets.

After the operation concluded in Qandahar, the Soviet military, not the Russian civilians, drove a truck loaded with the samples to the Kabul testing lab. The number of civilian personnel was enough to perform the drilling, digging, and testing but not enough to send someone with the samples to Kabul.

The team then took the equipment to the last city, Herat, to perform testing. The drive took about the same length of time as the previous trip had, but traveling to that city put the team closer to the fighting. While traveling on the road to Herat, they came across several pieces of destroyed Soviet military equipment.

Arriving in Herat, the USSR Mining team met the Soviet military force that was going to protect them. This force was roughly double the size of the previous one, and that added to the team’s anxiety.

The team members performed the testing as they had in the previous two cities, but they spent a lot more time looking around in the distance for mujahideen fighters. One night around the campfire, they heard fighting to the north, not machine-gun firing, but missiles or land mines.

The team performed four more tests at locations next to smaller cities before they returned to Kabul; they were relieved to finish the testing and get away from any fighting. When they were about 150 miles from the capital, the conversation became jovial. They arrived in Kabul with the samples at night.

The next morning, Viktor and his team spent the day at the testing building. The tests showed high concentrations of gold and copper in the ground. They also found high concentrations of lithium, but at that time, they did not know the value of this material. Duplicate reports were typed up, and one report was put in a metal box and placed under the floorboards of their office. At the time, Viktor did not know why they were putting the information in a box under the floor, but that was the directive from the KGB. He thought that if something happened to him and his team while traveling back to Moscow, the copy could be recovered from the building, but Viktor never asked questions when the KGB was involved.

When Viktor and his team arrived in Moscow, he resumed his role in the company as an executive in the international mining division. Several months passed before he sat in on a meeting discussing the information from Afghanistan. He was a part of the meeting because of his involvement with the data. Also at the meeting were several high-ranking Soviet military officers. They discussed the data and especially the gold and copper that had been found. It was at that meeting that Viktor finally understood the Soviet Union’s objective for the war in Afghanistan—to take over the country and start mining its vast supply of minerals.

At that point in the nine-year war, the military was losing some ground to the rebel fighters, and it was decided that mining operations would not commence until the Russians had better control of the country. Viktor thought that was a good idea considering the number