It's All in the Timing.

Sifting through the evidence amounting on the War in Afghanistan, more comes to light about the way the media chooses to act as a conduit for official information releases without many journalists wondering at the timing of it. Timing is important. It means that the public is only allowed to know just what it should when.

The task of journalist ought to be to ask questions about the evidence where it does not seem to cohere. Many, if not most, failed to do that with regards the Iraq War. One day somebody will have to trawl through the "media build up" to the Iraq War to ascertain just who raised logical doubts at the time about its veracity.

With regards the New York Times release of information on the sudden discovery of hard mineral deposits, this was written in June 2010,

WASHINGTON, 14 Jun (IPS) - The timing of the publication of a major New York Times story on the vast untapped mineral wealth that lies beneath Afghanistan's soil is raising major questions about the intent of the Pentagon, which released the information.

Given the increasingly negative news that has come out of Afghanistan - and of U.S. strategy there - some analysts believe the front-page article is designed to reverse growing public sentiment that the war is not worth the cost.

"What better way to remind people about the country's potential bright future - and by people I mean the Chinese, the Russians, the Pakistanis, and the Americans - than by publicising or re-publicising valid (but already public) information about the region's potential wealth?" wrote Marc AmBinder, the political editor of 'The Atlantic' magazine, on his blog.

"The way in which the story was presented - with on-the- record quotations from the Commander in Chief of CENTCOM [Gen. David Petraeus], no less - and the weird promotion of a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense to Undersecretary of Defense [Paul Brinkley] suggest a broad and deliberate information operation designed to influence public opinion on the course of the war," he added.

The nearly 1,500-word article, based almost entirely on Pentagon sources and featured as the lead story in Monday's 'Early Bird', a compilation of major national security stories that the Pentagon distributes each morning, asserted that Afghanistan may have close to one trillion dollars in untapped mineral deposits. These include "huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold, and critical industrial metals like lithium", the story said.

Afghanistan's total annual gross domestic product (GDP) last year came to about 13 billion dollars.

One "internal Pentagon memo" provided to the Times' author, James Risen predicted that Afghanistan could become "the 'Saudi Arabia of lithium,' a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and Blackberrys".

"There is stunning potential here," Petraeus told Risen in an interview Saturday. "There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant," he said of the conclusions of a study by a "small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists".

There are always "ifs". If those "ifs" are conjecture about a gas pipeline being a central part of NATO/ US geopolitical strategy, then its a "conspiracy theory". The fact it has not been built, in fact, must mean there has never been a consistent aim to get one built.

If those "ifs" are hopeful ones that add to optimism about stability and the success of the mission as determined by the US government, then they are legitimate "ifs". That they are utopian "ifs"are something that seldom comes up for sensible discussion.