Mining in Nuristan

The pegmatites are veins of very coarse granite that formed when the last, water-rich fraction of the Laghman granites, of Oligocene age by the US Geological Survey's reading, was squeezed into the older schist, gneiss and marble of the Hindu Kush. They run in two belts. The Nuristan belt on the east takes in the Pachigram, Parun, Kantiwa, Darra-i-Pech and Darra-i-Nur fields; the Hindukush belt on the west takes in Mandol, Nilaw-Kolum, Nilaw, Alingar and Shamakat. Soviet survey parties discovered them between 1971 and 1976 and counted 21 fields of ten to eight hundred square kilometres, each with tens and sometimes hundreds of veins. Single veins run from ten metres to two and five kilometres long and from one to sixty metres wide; vein number 8 at Nilaw-Kolum is four kilometres long and averages seven metres thick.

A 2025 review by Afghan geologists counts 76 deposits and occurrences and more than 55 minerals across the national belt, which itself is one segment of a Himalayan pegmatite belt running from Afghanistan through Pakistan to Bhutan. The Soviet geologists remarked on the likeness to the gem pegmatites of Pala and San Diego County in California. The veins have never been dated directly, and published potassium-argon ages on the granites scatter across hundreds of millions of years, so even the age rests on inference. That is the first thing to know about Nuristan's minerals: the maps are fifty years old and nothing systematic has been done since the Soviet withdrawal.

Kunzite is the clear, coloured form of spodumene, and most spodumene is grey and opaque and fills the veins by the tonne. That is Nuristan's lithium. Rossovsky put the content of the albitic pegmatites at 15 to 25 per cent spodumene, or 1 to 2 per cent lithium oxide, and estimated six deposits at Drumgal, Pasghushta, Tsamgal, Jamanak, Pashki and Jarigul at three million tonnes of lithium oxide to a depth of a hundred metres, which he said belonged among the largest in the world. The US Geological Survey's republication of the Soviet figures in 2011 gives a lower total, set out below, and attaches a warning that matters more than the number: the calculations appear to rest on surface exposures and samples, with no sign of drilling, trenching or underground working.

Set beside the world's lithium, these are resources of possibility rather than reserves. The Afghan review of 2025 puts the national figure at about 3.8 million tonnes of lithium oxide across twelve deposits, at roughly 1.7 per cent, and the US Geological Survey's 2024 summary credits Afghanistan with more than 1.8 million tonnes of lithium in resources. The USGS wrote in 2011 that the north-eastern pegmatites could be considered the world's recognised future principal source of lithium, and in the same breath that brines had displaced pegmatites as the main source of the metal. No systematic exploration has been carried out since the Soviet forces left.

The famous phrase, the Saudi Arabia of lithium, comes from an internal Pentagon memo quoted by the New York Times in June 2010 beside a one trillion dollar valuation of Afghanistan's minerals. The memo was about brines in Ghazni province, not Nuristan's pegmatites, and a USGS drilling programme later found the Ghazni pore waters held lithium at about a thousandth of the concentration of South American brines. The number that circulates for Nuristan alone, 2.5 million tonnes, has no traceable source or method. What has happened since 2021 is this: lithium extraction and sale were banned in August 2021; in January 2023 the authorities seized about a thousand tonnes of lithium-bearing rock in Jalalabad said to have come from Nuristan and Kunar, and arrested two Chinese and three Afghan men; a Chinese company offered ten billion dollars for lithium rights in April 2023; a committee inspected Nuristan's lithium mines in February 2023; and no contract has been announced. Chinese buyers were reported to be offering about 3,000 to 3,200 dollars a tonne for rock at five per cent lithium oxide.

Mining in Nuristan is what it has always been: men working a vein by hand. In 1985 about five hundred miners worked the kunzite field daily, following veins ten to twenty metres down and scraping crystals out of the pocket clay, and carrying the rough on foot to the Pakistani border. In 2023 reporters in the Pech valley found former soldiers using home-made explosives, a jackhammer run off a generator and no safety equipment, paying a levy that was doubled that year to four per cent of their takings. In 2018 some four hundred sites in the province were being dug without licence, with half the revenue reported to go to armed groups, and the ministry counted eleven insurgent-controlled mining sites in Nuristan between 2018 and 2020.

What has changed since 2024 is the selling. The provincial Directorate of Mines and Petroleum now gathers gem rough, chiefly from the Mawi workings in Du Ab, and sells it by open auction to domestic traders, with about ten per cent of each sale to the treasury and, by one account, the rest to the miners. Sales ran from 8 million afghanis in December 2024 to 122.5 million in September 2026, and Kunar sold 1,500 kilograms of Pech tourmaline for 119.3 million afghanis in July 2026. The buyers are the same dealers who carry the stones to Kabul and Peshawar. Our account of the auctions is on its own page, and the directorate said in 2023 that a mining procedure for the province had been sent to Kabul for approval so that the workings could be dug professionally; it has not been published.

What we can offer is what no survey can: people in the valleys. Our team in the province knows which workings are active, who holds them, what the miners are paid and what the traders pay, and how the directorate's auctions are run. If you are considering Nuristan for a mineral project, for gemstone sourcing or for the processing and cutting that the province has never had, we can tell you honestly what is there, introduce you to the people you would need to know, and say when something you have been promised is not real. We do not sell licences, hold mineral rights or take commission on contracts.