It's a universal problem, really. Just about any nation with a lot of land has enough natural resources to thrive if they do things carefully.
Afghanistan could be as wealthy as the Emirates if they joined the 21st century in education, worked to employ modern socioeconomic policies, and used that to learn how to survey and mine with modern efficiency. Back a few decades, the Soviets were really not there for any meaningful mission other than to try to dominate the place long enough to find strategic metal deposits, political intrigue and propaganda aside. Although the mountains and caves do make the place a natural fortress, if the Afghan fighters were not so effective at hillbilly guerilla warfare, Russia would have committed to full scale invasion and annexation.
Geologists have used satellite and seismic data along with seeing the tell tale landscape formations there to estimate that Afghanistan could easily hold some of the richest metal ore deposits in the world.