artists rifles, Afghanistan and the promise of plunder.

The latest  Western presence in Afghanistan is not, and was not, about  Democracy  or Freedom.It was certainly not about liberating Afghan women from the  clutches of their 'evil and savage' men.

 Read what follows. and be enlightened.  The fact that this long report is from CNN  says a lot.  The  backroom boys are crawling out of the woodwork. Their paths having been cleared and paved by  their spearhead cronies - the Pentagon.

This was a resource war. CNN Money tells a story that should have been told a long time ago . In Mainstream Media , that is. 

Pacifying and Plundering . That has always been the Game . since the beginning of the British Empire's Great Game. A game played out  with the help of  the Comprador Class of local collaborators. 

This is story that  needs  a lot of "between the lines " reading .  Read and think - outside the CNN Fortune box, naturally. 

A team of bankers starts to tap the country's vast mineral riches, with help from the Pentagon.

By James Bandler, editor-at-large

Villagers assembled for a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the gold mine in Qara Zaghan. The U.S. government estimates that minerals worth nearly $1 trillion lie beneath Afghanistan's soil.

FORTUNE -- Qara Zaghan, Afghanistan: The four Black Hawk helicopters sweep down on this remote river valley, flying fast and single file. Snow covers the mountains' peaks, but the lower slopes look like rust -- dry, rocky, and bare. As we bank around the river bend, we see our first flash of green in the fields below and then the rectangular mud huts of the village, where hundreds of Afghans mass to greet us.

"That's the mine over there," one of my companions says, pointing to the cliffs rising above the village.

That's it? That's the gold mine? It doesn't look all that different from the forbidding country we've been traversing: just another pile of rocks and scree. The jet-lagged man in the seat across from me knows better. His sleepy eyes are suddenly alert. If anyone can wrest a fortune from Afghanistan's rubble, it is this man, Ian Hannam.

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.

Afghanistan represents a gigantic, untapped opportunity -- one of the last great natural-resource frontiers. Landlocked and pinioned by imperial invaders, Afghanistan has been cursed by its geography for thousands of years. Now, for the first time, Hannam believes, that geography could be an asset. The two most resource-starved nations on the planet, China and India, sit next door to Afghanistan, where, according to Pentagon estimates, minerals worth nearly $1 trillion lie buried.

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.

A Chinese company is trying to start a copper operation in strife-torn Logar province, but actual mining is years away.

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.

After the toppling of the Taliban by the U.S.-led coalition, the Afghan government, with financial assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development, commissioned new, high-tech aerial surveys of Afghanistan. The results were stunning: The U.S. Geological Survey identified huge veins of copper, iron, lithium, gold, and silver.

Hannam's unit, the Artists Rifles, was a part-time regiment akin to a U.S. National Guard special forces unit. The Artists Rifles had a storied past and a reputation for attracting adventure seekers from all social classes. Since then, Hannam has counted his old SAS cronies as his closest friends, often calling on them to help him in the world's tougher places.

From Congo to Colombia, from Iraq to Sierra Leone, Hannam and his small team of soldiers-turned-bankers and advisers did business with oligarchs, gem dealers, and former mercenaries. He could be bracingly direct. When he landed in Baghdad for a meeting with Iraq's oil minister, the minister asked, "What are you here for?"

"I'm here to make five new Iraqi billionaires every year for the next 10 years," Hannam said with a twinkle in his eyes. It was an effective icebreaker, recalled his friend Richard Williams, a former SAS commander who is now CEO of the Afghan gold mine. "They're all thinking, 'How can I be one of those?' Which is not a question that a minister should be thinking." However crude, Hannam's point -- it would be Iraqis, not Westerners, who were getting rich -- worked.

http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/05/11/jp-morgan-hunt-afghan-gold/