Lithium is not that good. Currently it is used in batterys cause of its reactivity and properties allowing cheapish, rechargable and high capacity batteries.
Environmentally Lithium is not very good for organisims. Additionally the battery designs are potentially unsafe (look up lithium ion battery explosions) and not very long lasting.
Fortunatly a number of technologies are in development aimed at improving the effectivness of batteries. These range from nano matrix cell meshes where carbon naniotubes allow greater surface exposure thus upping charge rate, durability, capacity and etc to using alternitive storage methods.
There are proposed designes for carbon nano tube stacks, which allow even higher energy density than chemical batteries through the principlies of electric fields due to the high conductivity of carbon nanotubes (8 times better than copper).
Anyway, there is enough money there that it could potentially displace terriosts from the area. However there are additionally the risk that the revenue could directly fund terroists. Infact they would have enough money to buy WoMD like nuclear devices which could spark the next generation of terroism.
Fortunatly america and allies are still holding in Afganisan, a wise move with such resources cause it would almost certainly be garunteed that any revenue from them would be used to fund terroists otherwise. Additionally as long as forces of the developed world are present there it garuntees the utalization of the resource deposits, thus we can expect to see reduction in market prices of the resources which will eventually result in minor price reductions to us, the consumers.
i just hope them terrorist groups or ne other bad guy group doesnt get a hold of it 
