This is good stuff:
Arriving in a developing nation with his iPad and his enigmatic smile, Hannam personifies the soft side of Western power. He doesn’t bend people to his will with weapons or threats. But there is no mistaking the dealmaker’s impact: In his wake, mountains are razed, villages electrified, schools built, and fortunes made.
This is something of an adventure story. It’s got, mountain caravans, snowy plane crashes, a war-torn land, and a history of how Afghanistan’s mineral riches have gone unexploited for nearly two centuries. One big reason: There’s hardly any infrastructure. The history is good here:
But if the risks are absurd, the potential rewards are off the charts. Hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of iron, copper, rare earth metals, and, yes, gold are buried beneath Afghanistan’s deserts and mountains. This wealth has lain there mainly undisturbed for thousands of years as armies of Persians, Greeks, Mongols, Britons, Russians, and now Americans tramped above. Invaders have dreamed of exploiting it since the time of Alexander the Great, but no one has yet succeeded on a large scale.
In an 1841 article in a journal of Asiatic studies, Capt. Henry Drummond, a member of the British 3rd Bengal Light Cavalry, described his rambles through the wildest parts of Afghanistan to conduct the first Western mineral survey of the country. He found “abundant green stains” of copper, some of which rivaled the deposits of Chile, and veins of iron ore that “might no doubt be obtained equal to the Swedish.” While many of his countrymen viewed Afghanistan as an untamable place, where a man could not stray many yards from his home or tent without risk of being murdered, Drummond was smitten. Mining, he felt — not the gun — offered the best hope to pacify the territory and win over Afghans.
It’s a good look at, as Fortune calls it, “frontier capitalism.” Or as some might put it: late-stage American imperialism.
The Fortune piece on Afghanistan was linked on Naked Capitalism a while ago. I remember sending it to a friend so we could scoff at it together, and it has not improved with time. It reads like the first chapter of a cheap novel, describing the ubermensch hero: ruggedly handsome, former special forces, spewing snappy dark humor ("Unless it's fools gold"), and of course by necessity the chosen one, who alone holds the power to tame the wild Mohammedans ("If anyone can wrest a fortune from Afghanistan's rubble, it is this man, Ian Hannam."). At one point it literally describes Hannam as charming the Afghans with "a twinkle in his eye".
Even if the tone were not ridiculous, the voice seems off for a news piece. One paragraph begins: "As he flies to the mine for the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Hannam thinks back over the past 12 months". This isn't followed by any kind of quote or other context, the reader is left to assume that the writer is simply privy to Hannam's thoughts. Again, the phrasing makes the article sound like the type of literature sold at grocery store checkouts, not a serious piece of journalism.
And if you consider all the facts presented outside of the context of unequivocal praise, Hannam doesn't really sound like that nice a man. He plots with Persian Gulf princelings to break up a corporation behind its president's back, he contracts for the UK government in their backing of other Gulf monarchs putting down a popular revolution, and he flies away from his employer in a huff to sulk after not being promoted. Somehow these are all couched in terms that glorify Hannam further: counterinsurgency innovator, ambitious businessman who perhaps flew too close to the sun, loyal company man passed over for outsider. There's no kind of critical analysis applied to what are pretty clearly faults in the man's character, presumably because it would detract from the image being built of a capitalist hero, come to liberate the unwashed savages.
The article was factually accurate and informative, but for me the writing was, frankly, lousy, and I'm surprised that CJR isn't taking a harder line with it.
#1 Posted by Xiafang, CJR on Wed 25 May 2011 at 09:19 PM