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It's reckoned that as much as 60 percent of Afghanistans gross domestic product has been generated from the presence of foreign troops over the past decade - either directly through military spending in the country, or because of the billions of dollars of aid and investment that followed in its wake.

As recently as 2011, around 45 percent of the government's core budget - money for wages and running costs - and almost all of its funding for new projects was coming from overseas donors.

In 2013, US alone spent $12.9 in the country - $9.95bn of it on security assistance to arm and train Afghan military and police forces.

But with US and NATO forces being withdrawn by the end of this year, that flow of funds is bound to slow down and increase the strain on an economy battered by years of conflict and now uncertain about what the future holds.

Yet Afghanistan is not without its own resources.

It has vast deposits of copper (among the largest in Eurasia), iron, high-grade chrome ore, uranium, beryl, barite, lead, zinc, fluorspar, bauxite, cobalt, lithium, tantalum, emeralds, gold and silver. According to some estimates these reserves are so big and include so many minerals essential to modern industry that Afghanistan has the potential to become one of the most important mining centres in the world, worth well in excess of a trillion US dollars to the Afghani economy.

Little of this has ever been developed because of the security and political situation, but one day it might be - although exactly when, how and by whom, no one knows. For now it just sits there, waiting.

The Afghan emerald is renowned as the best in terms of qualityone of the most crystalline, one of the purest

Raphael Chahboub, emerald dealer

Emerald cities

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Afghanistan's hidden gems