New York Times reporter James Risen is fighting back against critics who have cast a skeptical eye on his Page One story yesterday about Afghanistan's mineral deposits. In an interview with Yahoo! News, Risen dismissed suspicions that the story was part of an orchestrated campaign to rescue the troubled American effort there and derided critical bloggers as pajama-clad layabouts with no reporting chops. 
 
 Risen's story reported the findings of ongoing Pentagon research into the value Afghanistan's lithium, copper, iron, and other mineral deposits, and cited officials claiming that "the United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself." 
 
 Risen's piece quickly drew fire from online reporters and writers (including this one), who pointed out that many of the story's purported revelations about Afghanistan's mineral reserves had been previously reported. They also questioned the timing of the story, coming as it did on the heels of a series of troubling reports about the stability of the Karzai government and one day before Gen. David Petraeus was scheduled to testify before Congress about the war. 
 
 The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder wrote that the story "suggest[s] a broad and deliberate information operation designed to influence public opinion on the course of the war." Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall wrote that "the timing of the revelation is enough to raise some suspicions in my mind." And Foreign Policy's Blake Hounshell wrote that "there's less to this scoop than meets the eye." 
 
 Risen didn't take kindly to the blogospheric criticism. "Bloggers should do their own reporting instead of sitting around in their pajamas," Risen said. 
 
 "The thing that amazes me is that the blogosphere thinks they can deconstruct other people's stories," Risen told Yahoo! News during an increasingly hostile interview, which he called back to apologize for almost immediately after it ended. "Do you even know anything about me? Maybe you were still in school when I broke the NSA story, I don't know. It was back when you were in kindergarten, I think." (Risen and fellow Times reporter Eric Lichtblau shared a 2006 Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on the Bush administration's secret wiretapping program; this reporter was 33 years old at the time.) 
 
 Risen defended the article against claims that Afghanistan's mineral wealth was largely a matter of public knowledge prior to his story. "If it wasn't news, then why didn't anybody write about it?" he asked. 
 
 In fact, McClatchy Newspapers reported last year that "the region is thought to hold some of the world's last major untapped deposits of iron, copper, gold, uranium, precious gems and other raw materials." In February, Agence France Presse quoted Afghan president Hamid Karzai, citing a U.S. Geological Survey study, claiming that his country had $1 trillion in mineral assets. Just last month, Karzai repeated the claim at a U.S. Institute of Peace event, saying the value was between $1 trillion and $3 trillion. 
 
 "But no one picked up on it," Risen said. He explained that he based his report on the work of a Pentagon team led by Paul Brinkley, a deputy undersecretary of defense charged with rebuilding the Afghan economy. Using geological data from the Soviet era and USGS surveys conducted in 2006, Brinkley dispatched teams to Afghanistan last year to search for minerals on the ground. The data they've come back with, combined with internal Pentagon assessments that value the deposits at more than $900 billion, constitute news, according to Risen. (Those surveys are still under way, according to a briefing Brinkley gave yesterday.) 
 
 "The question is how extensive it was," Risen said of the survey work. "The value of what Brinkley's team did was to put together and connect the dots on a lot of information that had been put on the shelf. And they did new research and came up with a lot of new data and put everything together in a more comprehensive way." 
 
 So was the story a Pentagon plant, designed to show the American public a shiny metallic light at the end of the long tunnel that is the Afghan war, as skeptics allege? Risen said he heard about the Pentagon's efforts from Milt Bearden, a retired CIA officer who was active in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The men co-authored a book, "The Main Enemy," in 2003, and Bearden is now a consultant working with Brinkley's survey team. 
 
 "Several months ago, Milt started telling me about what they were finding," Risen said. "At the beginning of the year, I said I wanted to do a story on it." At first both Bearden and Brinkley resisted, Risen said, but he eventually wore them down. "Milt convinced Brinkley to talk to me," he said, "and Brinkley convinced other Pentagon officials to go on the record. I think Milt realized that things were going so badly in Afghanistan that people would be willing to talk about this." In other words, according to Risen, he wasn't handed the story in a calculated leak. Calls and emails to Brinkley and to Eric Clark, a Pentagon public relations contractor who works with him, were not immediately returned. 
 
 Minutes after making his initial angry comments about bloggers, Risen called back to apologize. "I was taken aback by some of the criticism, and didn't sleep well last night, and was upset about it. I apologize." 
 
 —John Cook is a senior national reporter/blogger for Yahoo! News ||||| ink-stained wretches Cranky Times Reporter Lashes Out at Critical Bloggers 
 
 With many online news outlets wondering whether a New York Times story on Afghanistan's mineral deposits was less a fresh discovery than a PR ploy by the Army, the story's author, James Risen, let loose on the brash, ignorant youngsters who dare to question him. "Do you even know anything about me?" he asked Yahoo News blogger John Cook, late of Gawker. "Maybe you were still in school when I broke the NSA story, I don't know. It was back when you were in kindergarten, I think." 
 
 Cook also tweeted that Risen, falling back on hurtful stereotypes, said that bloggers who criticized the story were just "jerking off in their pajamas." Ouch, man. Ouch. That just shows how little Risen actually understands bloggers. We would never jerk off in our only article of clothing. 
 
 Shortly after hanging up, Risen regained his composure and called back. "I was taken aback by some of the criticism, and didn't sleep well last night, and was upset about it," he said. "I apologize." Sounds like someone needs a nappy-poo. 
 
 NYT reporter defends Afghan minerals piece, lashes out at critics [Newsroom/Yahoo] ||||| While it could take many years to develop a mining industry, the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war. 
 
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 “There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.” 
 
 The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan’s existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the United States and other industrialized countries. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is only about $12 billion. 
 
 “This will become the backbone of the Afghan economy,” said Jalil Jumriany, an adviser to the Afghan minister of mines. 
 
 American and Afghan officials agreed to discuss the mineral discoveries at a difficult moment in the war in Afghanistan. The American-led offensive in Marja in southern Afghanistan has achieved only limited gains. Meanwhile, charges of corruption and favoritism continue to plague the Karzai government, and Mr. Karzai seems increasingly embittered toward the White House. 
 
 So the Obama administration is hungry for some positive news to come out of Afghanistan. Yet the American officials also recognize that the mineral discoveries will almost certainly have a double-edged impact. 
 
 Instead of bringing peace, the newfound mineral wealth could lead the Taliban to battle even more fiercely to regain control of the country. 
 
 The corruption that is already rampant in the Karzai government could also be amplified by the new wealth, particularly if a handful of well-connected oligarchs, some with personal ties to the president, gain control of the resources. Just last year, Afghanistan’s minister of mines was accused by American officials of accepting a $30 million bribe to award China the rights to develop its copper mine. The minister has since been replaced. 
 
 Endless fights could erupt between the central government in Kabul and provincial and tribal leaders in mineral-rich districts. Afghanistan has a national mining law, written with the help of advisers from the World Bank, but it has never faced a serious challenge. 
 
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 “No one has tested that law; no one knows how it will stand up in a fight between the central government and the provinces,” observed Paul A. Brinkley, deputy undersecretary of defense for business and leader of the Pentagon team that discovered the deposits. 
 
 At the same time, American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, which could upset the United States, given its heavy investment in the region. After winning the bid for its Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, China clearly wants more, American officials said. 
 
 Another complication is that because Afghanistan has never had much heavy industry before, it has little or no history of environmental protection either. “The big question is, can this be developed in a responsible way, in a way that is environmentally and socially responsible?” Mr. Brinkley said. “No one knows how this will work.” 
 
 With virtually no mining industry or infrastructure in place today, it will take decades for Afghanistan to exploit its mineral wealth fully. “This is a country that has no mining culture,” said Jack Medlin, a geologist in the United States Geological Survey’s international affairs program. “They’ve had some small artisanal mines, but now there could be some very, very large mines that will require more than just a gold pan.” 
 
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 The mineral deposits are scattered throughout the country, including in the southern and eastern regions along the border with Pakistan that have had some of the most intense combat in the American-led war against the Taliban insurgency. 
 
 The Pentagon task force has already started trying to help the Afghans set up a system to deal with mineral development. International accounting firms that have expertise in mining contracts have been hired to consult with the Afghan Ministry of Mines, and technical data is being prepared to turn over to multinational mining companies and other potential foreign investors. The Pentagon is helping Afghan officials arrange to start seeking bids on mineral rights by next fall, officials said. 
 
 “The Ministry of Mines is not ready to handle this,” Mr. Brinkley said. “We are trying to help them get ready.” 
 
 Like much of the recent history of the country, the story of the discovery of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth is one of missed opportunities and the distractions of war. 
 
 In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989. 
 
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 During the chaos of the 1990s, when Afghanistan was mired in civil war and later ruled by the Taliban, a small group of Afghan geologists protected the charts by taking them home, and returned them to the Geological Survey’s library only after the American invasion and the ouster of the Taliban in 2001. 
 
 “There were maps, but the development did not take place, because you had 30 to 35 years of war,” said Ahmad Hujabre, an Afghan engineer who worked for the Ministry of Mines in the 1970s. 
 
 Armed with the old Russian charts, the United States Geological Survey began a series of aerial surveys of Afghanistan’s mineral resources in 2006, using advanced gravity and magnetic measuring equipment attached to an old Navy Orion P-3 aircraft that flew over about 70 percent of the country. 
 
 The data from those flights was so promising that in 2007, the geologists returned for an even more sophisticated study, using an old British bomber equipped with instruments that offered a three-dimensional profile of mineral deposits below the earth’s surface. It was the most comprehensive geologic survey of Afghanistan ever conducted. 
 
 The handful of American geologists who pored over the new data said the results were astonishing. 
 
 But the results gathered dust for two more years, ignored by officials in both the American and Afghan governments. In 2009, a Pentagon task force that had created business development programs in Iraq was transferred to Afghanistan, and came upon the geological data. Until then, no one besides the geologists had bothered to look at the information — and no one had sought to translate the technical data to measure the potential economic value of the mineral deposits. 
 
 Soon, the Pentagon business development task force brought in teams of American mining experts to validate the survey’s findings, and then briefed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Mr. Karzai. 
 
 So far, the biggest mineral deposits discovered are of iron and copper, and the quantities are large enough to make Afghanistan a major world producer of both, United States officials said. Other finds include large deposits of niobium, a soft metal used in producing superconducting steel, rare earth elements and large gold deposits in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan. 
 
 Just this month, American geologists working with the Pentagon team have been conducting ground surveys on dry salt lakes in western Afghanistan where they believe there are large deposits of lithium. Pentagon officials said that their initial analysis at one location in Ghazni Province showed the potential for lithium deposits as large of those of Bolivia, which now has the world’s largest known lithium reserves. 
 
 For the geologists who are now scouring some of the most remote stretches of Afghanistan to complete the technical studies necessary before the international bidding process is begun, there is a growing sense that they are in the midst of one of the great discoveries of their careers. 
 
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 “On the ground, it’s very, very, promising,” Mr. Medlin said. “Actually, it’s pretty amazing.”
– New York Times reporter James Risen is not a big fan of bloggers. Yahoo News blogger John Cook, formerly of Gawker, learned this when he called Risen to ask about criticism of his recent story on Afghan mineral deposits. (Original story here; sample of criticism here.) "Do you even know anything about me?" Risen asked. "Maybe you were still in school when I broke the NSA story, I don't know. It was back when you were in kindergarten, I think." (Risen shared a Pulitzer in 2006 for a story on secret wiretapping. Cook was age 33.) "The thing that amazes me is that the blogosphere thinks they can deconstruct other people's stories," Risen continued. And while a tamer version of this line appeared on Yahoo News, Cook tweeted that Risen accused bloggers of sitting around and "jerking off in their pajamas," reports New York magazine. Minutes after hanging up, Risen called back. "I was taken aback by some of the criticism, and didn't sleep well last night, and was upset about it. I apologize."