A team of Pentagon officials and American geologists discovered the vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral reserves which is likely to generate nearly USD1 trillion for the economy. An internal memo from the Pentagon sees Afghanistan as the “Saudi Arabia of lithium”, a key raw material for batteries of laptops and BlackBerrys. However, veteran Afghans claimed that the “discovery” was hardly new as similar findings from Russia, World Bank and the U.N. also surfaced in the 1970s.