Malala Yousafzai, don't pay attention to this girl - she had a hole in her head!
That fact is true, but not a reason to ignore her warning on true danger - Pakistani militants aka The Taliban. Malala was feted at the United Nations after a failed head-shot in a Taliban assassination attempt to rid Pakistan of this female scourge pushing for women's fundamental education rights against Sharia Laws. Afghanistan remains one of the worst places on Earth to be a woman, despite billions of dollars in aid and pledges to better their lives. There is now mounting concern that such freedoms will not be protected and may even be traded away as Kabul seeks a peace deal with the Taliban, as most foreign troops prepare to leave the country by the end of 2014.
"Public opinion is confused about the Malala issue. Many people hate Malala," said Zubair Torwali, a newspaper columnist from her home valley of Swat. "Anything here in Pakistan related to the West or America becomes a thing of conspiracy. The Taliban's ideology is flourishing in Pakistan. It is victorious."
The simple truth is that the Taliban are doing as well as they are because they are being supported by Pakistan in Afghanistan. Afghanistan's old ethnic conflict has become a proxy war for the bitter feud between the region's two nuclear powers, Pakistan and India. Like the Israeli-Palestinian issue, the problems between India and Pakistan stem from the ill-conceived and poorly implemented geopolitics of the partition of the British Empire in 1948. And the Taliban are being supported by Pakistan because the Pakistani generals fear being squeezed in an Indian nutcracker, faced with not only a massive Indian presence to their south but a pro-Indian regime to the north in Afghanistan.
The real truth is even more complex. There is not just a proxy war between India and Pakistan, but also Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the US too. So, what lies at the heart of the current war in Afghanistan is the hostility between India and Pakistan, ongoing for more than 60 years and the malign influence of Qatar, Saudi and other vastly rich gulf states on an impoverished Pakistan forcing Salafism onto Islamic believers as the truer pure Islam of the Queran along with violence that strict religious radicalism often brings.
Additionally, Obama has told Afghanis and Pakistanis that the U.S. is and will be leaving in 2014, thereby creating a vacuum relinquishing back the region to the Afghan goverment and Taliban. Will the Taliban get together for a big kumbaya group hug? ...Hmmn, that will never happen because India most likely would be filling the security vacuum left by the US withdrawal, advance its regional interests, compete with its Chinese rival for influence in the country as China hedges mining minerals and resources by investing heavily into the rural populations of mountainous areas, and thwart its Pakistani enemy at the same time.
Boy, isn't this great news? All of our U.S. "blood and treasures" have been dumped 
down into this Afghanistan - Pakistan regional rat hole, and for what? It's certainly not for any form of "Democracy" in Afghanistan or Pakistan, nor in an al Queda "Theocracy" under a totalitarian Islamic regime somewhere. The American people have been "sold a bill of goods" by our Washington politicians to enter a war chasing after the al Queda and a President Obama that cut back pentagon funding so that we ended up just chasing after our own tail - and so, What are the real facts? We certainly did not learn them in U.S. public school history classes. Stupid students. Stupid citizens - Dead soldiers. Sad.
Afghanistan has deposits of rare earths, gold, copper, iron and other minerals worth an estimated $3 Trillion. The problem is that they are located in one of the country's most dangerous spots, on the south bank of the Helmand River, in a traditional Taliban stronghold. All cell phones need the other rare earth minerals for circuit boards. China produces 97 per cent of the world’s rare earths output. However, it is estimated to hold only 30 per cent of the world reserves.
So now China takes away needed massive mineral deposits while the U.S. walks away with nothing for all of their body bags or military assets and money wasted.
FACTOID: According to a recent Congressional Research Service report, world demand for rare earth metals is estimated to be 136,000 tons per year, and projected to rise to at least 185,000 tons annually by 2015. With continued global growth of the middle class, especially in China, India and Africa, demand will continue to grow. High-tech products and renewable energy technology cannot function without rare earth metals. Neodymium, terbium and dysprosium are essential ingredients in the magnets of wind turbines and computer hard drives; a number of rare earth metals are used in nickel-metal-hydride rechargeable batteries that power electric vehicles and many other products; yttrium is necessary for color TVs, fuel cells and fluorescent lamps; europium is a component of compact fluorescent bulbs and TV and iPhone screens; cerium and lanthanum are used in catalytic converters; platinum group metals are needed as catalysts in fuel cell technology; and other rare earth metals are essential for solar cells, cell phones, computer chips, medical imaging, jet engines, defense technology, and much more.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-09-rare-earth-metals.html#jCp
