(An oil installation near Herat, western Afghanistan)

A team of U.S. geologists and Pentagon officials have concluded that Afghanistan is sitting on untapped mineral deposits worth more than $1 trillion, officials said. The deposits of iron, copper, cobalt and critical industrial elements such as lithium are enough to  fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the war itself, the officials said.

Lithium is a key raw material for the manufacture of batteries for laptops and mobile phones, and the potential reserves of the metal are so huge that the country may well become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium”, a Pentagon memo said.

(Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani)

If you still thought things hadn’t dramatically changed on the Afghan chessboard ever since U.S. President Barack Obama announced plans to begin pulling out from mid-2011, you only need to look at President Hamid Karzai’s recent utterances, or more accurately the lack of it, on the Taliban and Pakistan, the other heavyweights on the stage.

For months Karzai has gone noticeably quiet on Pakistan, refusing to excoriate the neighbour for aiding the Taliban as he routinely did in the past, The Guardian quoted  a source close to the country’s former intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh as saying.

(An IED blast in Afghanistan's Helmand province.Reuters/Asmaa Waguih

Reuters photographer Asmaa Waguih was embedded with U.S. forces in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. for two months. Here’s her account of a close shave with an IED  blast.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that a large part of my time with U.S. Marines in Afghanistan would be marked out by the Marines’ order : “hurry up and wait”.  I would wait for hours for flights to remote places, for a foot patrol to start but above all wait for action to happen so I could shoot live combat.

(Outside the Indian embassy in Kabul after a blast in October 2009. REUTERS/Ahmad Masood)

India and Pakistan are both competing for influence in Afghanistan in a modern-day version of the Great Game that has complicated the search for a settlement, but on the streets of Kabul the Indians still seem to evoke greater goodwill.

Afghanistan is holding a peace jirga or a meeting of tribal elders and notables to discuss plans for a political settlment of the nine-year conflict. Reuters text, pictures and television journalists will be blogging live from Kabul when the conference opens on June 2 in a giant tent under heavy security guard.

(File picture of a refugee camp in Bagram district)

Returning to Bagram, the massive U.S. and NATO base north of the Afghan capital, after an interval of two years is an instructive experience. The first thing that hits you as you drive through the dusty Shomali plains, framed by snowcapped mountains, is the war economy. All along the road out of Kabul are huge container depots and trucks — either on their way to Bagram or returning — lined up by the road. Most of the trucks are from Pakistan, marked by brightly decorated exteriors that have become an art form which lightens life on the road.

The U.S. military transports everything from the gum that soldiers chew almost incessantly to the armoured vehciles they use to fight the war — there is virtually nothing the military can source from here yet. For all the troubles in Pakistan, anything up to 80 percent of the military supplies into landlocked Afghanistan are routed through there. That’s the geographical reality with supplies shipped to the warm water port of Karachi and then driven up through Pakistan and into Afghanistan most of it through the northwest, but also the crossing in Baluchistan, further south.