Two London Business School alumni are braving the frontline to contribute to rebuilding wartorn Afghanistan in very different ways. This was first published in AlumniNews, Issue 131, February 2014. Find out more about our alumni community at http://www.london.edu/alumni

1. AlumniNews ISSUE 131
FEBRUARY 2014AlumniNews ISSUE 131
FEBRUARY 2014
Two London Business School
alumni are braving the frontline
to contribute to rebuilding war-
torn Afghanistan in very
different ways. DOMINIC
MIDGLEY reports
RECONSTRUCTING
A WAR ZONE
DIGGING DEEP
Ian Hannam hopes
to create jobs and
wealth through gold
and copper mining

2. ■TheBigIssue/Reconstructing Afghanistan
IF EVER A COUNTRY presents a
challenge to an incoming investor,
it’s Afghanistan. After all, it has
been in a state of almost constant
civil war since the Soviet invasion of
1979. While the Soviet troops left a
decade after they arrived, the
puppet regime they left behind was
soon toppled and the country
descended into a proxy war
between Saudi Arabia and Iran. By
1994 the Taliban – backed by
Pakistan – was on the rise but it
was opposed by more secular
forces and ultimately driven out of
Kabul when the US, supported by
the UK and others, invaded in
2001.
Naturally, this incessant conflict
took a heavy toll on the country
and its people. Millions were killed,
millions more were displaced – a
third of the population are
estimated to have fled to Pakistan
and elsewhere – and large parts of
Kabul were razed to the ground.
The international community has
spent more than $30bn on
reconstruction projects with varying
degrees of success since 2002
but, with the last US troops
departing next year, the future
remains uncertain.
In this context, it takes a big man
to step forward with an ambitious
development plan. And they don’t
get much more formidable than
Ian Hannam MSc17(1984). Until
September 2012, he was
Chairman of JP Morgan Capital
Markets and since 1997 he has
advised on the listing of 12 large
companies in London, six of which
entered the FTSE100.
“Traditionally, for every dollar
a mining company generates,
after it’s paid a dollar in
taxes, it creates six dollars
through the wider economy. ”
Ian Hannam
MSc17(1984)
has ambitious
plans for
mining in
Afghanistan
The miner

3. ■TheBigIssue/Reconstructing Afghanistan
Perhaps equally significantly,
given the nature of the terrain on
which he is operating, he started
out as an engineer working in
challenging territories such as
northern Nigeria and Oman before
joining London Business School,
and spent 20 years in the Territorial
SAS.
And it is the School that he
credits with enabling him to make a
career-defining change of direction
almost 30 years ago: “I believe it
completely rounded me off as a
human being, and taught me
things which I needed and I didn’t
know, such as finance, operations
and negotiation. As a result, I saw
other opportunities which led me to
move to New York and join the
training programme at Salomon
Brothers.”
The seeds of his current venture
date back to 2010 when he
worked with the US Department of
Defence to analyse data prepared
by Russian mining experts on the
scale of mineral deposits in
Afghanistan. The resulting report
estimates that Afghanistan’s
copper and gold could be worth
up to $1.4trn dollars.
In 2010, Ian – who is also a
member of the School’s Governing
Body and the Campaign
Committee – established a
company called Centar to invest in
the Afghan minerals sector, and it
has been awarded preferred bidder
status in an official auction for six
copper and gold exploration
licences via its subsidiary, Afghan
Gold & Minerals.
While Centar is designed to
make a return for its shareholders,
Ian also sees it as a vehicle for
giving something back to society.
“The people of Afghanistan want to
improve themselves,” he says.
“Forty per cent of its population is
under the age of 26 and a
signifcant number of them have
spent time in Britain or America,
and have gone back. They are very
sophisticated. They’ve got a culture
and a history. “They may look to
Bollywood rather than Hollywood,
but they are, in general, moderates.
Cricket is very popular and they are
also crazy about football. There are
now eight teams in a league, and
we are sponsoring one.”
Centar currently has around 550
people working in Afghanistan, the
vast majority of them – 525 –
Afghans. While it has a drilling

4. ■TheBigIssue/Reconstructing Afghanistan
operation and a mining service
company, it cannot proceed at the
pace it would like until the country
passes a new Mining Law. “The
real problem is that there is so
much microscope scrutiny relating
to the award of these licenses that
every step is painfully slow,” he
says. “If it was down to us, we
would have liked to be in
production and paying taxes by
now. That said, tremendous
progress is being made. Fifteen
world-class deposits have been
identifed and prioritised, and the
first leg of Afghanistan’s first railway
line was completed last year.”
Ian reckons that if the Mining
Law is passed, half the revenue of
the Afghan government could be
generated from the exploitation of
natural resources revenue within
ten years.The other half will come
from growth in the services sector,
with scope for extensive expansion
of the mobile phone and retail
markets, as a result of the multiplier
effect.
“Traditionally, for every dollar a
mining company generates, after
it’s paid a dollar in taxes, it creates
six dollars through the wider
economy,” he says. “Drillers and
truckers have to be fed and that, in
turn, creates demand for farmers
and butchers and bakers, for
example.”
For a country that is still very
much in transition, it is an
inspirational vision. ■

5. ■TheBigIssue/Reconstructing Afghanistan
WHEN SHOSHANA CLARK
STEWART MBA2013 arrived in
Kabul in 2006 as a volunteer for
development charity Turquoise
Mountain, she was a 26-year-old
teacher who had never managed
anything bigger than a class of
school children in a US inner city
school.
What’s more, the organisation
that she joined was less than six
months old, had a handful of
computers and 150 staff.
Seven years on, with an MBA
from London Business School
under her belt, she is CEO of the
organisation, with 500 full-time staff
and students, which is engaged in
a range of projects, including an
estimated $1m in sales of Afghan
crafts next year.
In the process, Turquoise
Mountain has transformed the
The aid worker
Change we can believe in: Turquoise Mountain has restored 110 traditional
buildings from derelict shells to their former glory. Window screens lovingly restored
(above); a courtyard rebuilt and planted (below)

6. ■TheBigIssue/Reconstructing Afghanistan
fortunes of a particular community
in Kabul’s historic old town.
It consists of 70 extended families
totalling 1,800 people and hosts a
bazaar that attracts a further 10,000
people on a daily basis.
When Shoshana first arrived, the
streets were piled high with debris
and many of the houses had been
damaged during the extended
Afghan conflict.
Since then, Turquoise Mountain
has established a clinic serving
nearly 20,000 patients a year, her
team of builders have rebuilt no
fewer than 110 traditional buildings
and an institute for traditional
artisans has been set up.
Projects backed by Turquoise
Mountain today range from a small
group of calligraphers and a
women’s jewellery-making co-
operative to a wood-working
workshop which can deliver
$200,000 commissions. The
products of these outfits are now
sold by a number of blue-chip
retailers in the West.
As Turquoise Mountain – named
after a long forgotten Afghan
dynasty – grew in size and
complexity, Shoshana realised that
she would benefit from some
formal business training.
As an American, you might have
assumed she would opt for a US
school but, apart from the fact she
is married to a Brit, she was also
greatly taken by the diversity of
intake.
“There is no place as genuinely
international as London,” she says.
“It’s true of the city and it’s true of
the School. It doesn’t feel like a
British school with a bunch of
foreigners in it.
“My study group was perfectly
representative of the class. It
consisted of me, the American
teacher/NGO worker, Lydia, a
Chinese woman who had worked
in marketing, James from Australia
who had done management
consulting, Antonio from Portugal
who had been an engineer, George
from Greece who was in private
equity, and Pranav from India who
was in real estate private equity.
Two women, four men, six sectors,
six countries, 11 languages it was
amazing.”
She adds: “Before attending
London Business School I had
learned everything I knew about
managing from managing. I had
had no formal training at all, except
in education. When I did the MBA, I
found it offered me a new set of
options. I felt that I was at the
perfect stage in my career to get a
lot out of it.
“I had had so many different
experiences that I could nail on to
the structure I was being taught. I
remember the management

7. ■TheBigIssue/Reconstructing Afghanistan
accounting class in particular. I
loved it because I had an example
in my head for every single topic
from charging costs across
departments, to how to price the
time of my staff. Basically, the MBA
filled in holes in my skill-set.”
The financial and business
planning elements of the course
have proved particularly useful in
running an increasingly complex
project.
“We’re trying to grow 30 small
independent Afghan businesses to
stand on their own two feet,” she
says. “I can build their accounts
with them which I never would
have been able to do before.
“A lot of the organisational
behaviour classes were really
wonderful too. There are a lot of
things that psychologists know
about the way our brains work that
I’ve found very helpful.
“Whether it’s knowing how
people will react to your posture or
the ways you might identify what
the bargaining zone is between
two positions. They are things you
might have known instinctively, but
might not have been able to deploy
or identify. As soon as you
understand them, you don’t forget
them. A lot of the organisational
behaviour classes were great in
that way.”
In an unstable environment such
as Afghanistan, a sensitivity to
nuance is a valuable quality.
Shoshana and her colleagues at
Turquoise Mountain take great
pains to keep the authorities up to
speed with everything they do. She
estimates that they have shown
one or two people around the area
every day for the past seven years
to make sure that the people who
matter at the ministries of urban
development, education and
culture, as well as the President’s
office are aware of the progress
they were making.
After all, until Turquoise Mountain
got involved, the plan was to
bulldoze the area and erect
concrete high-rises, and no one
wants the powers that be to revert
to that policy.
With US troops due to leave the
country this year, the national future
is uncertain. The Afghan security
forces are taking on more and more
responsibility from their American
counterparts as the transition
process nears its end but it remains
to be seen how they will cope with
the Taliban once the Americans
have departed. The presidential
election due in April 2014 is another
source of uncertainty.
But Shoshana remains guardedly
optimistic: “We are lucky to work
closely with one community in an
area of the city that we have grown
to know very well.” ■

8. ■TheBigIssue/Reconstructing Afghanistan
THE DISTRICT THAT
TURQUOISE MOUNTAIN was
created to restore is called Murad
Khane and it was once the pride of
Kabul. But, in 2006, when
Shoshana Clark Stewart arrived, it
had become a refuse heap for the
expanding city.
There was no running water,
electricity or sewerage. One in five
children died before the age of five
and the adult life expectancy was
37. Its once-fine buildings, with
their distinctive carved wood
screens had virtually disappeared
under mountains of garbage.
In the summer of 2006, the 50
members of the community of
Murad Khane under their
headman, a famous former
wrestler called Pahlawan Aziz,
invited Turquoise Mountain to work
alongside them in renovating the
old town. In the years that followed
25,000 truck-loads of garbage
were cleared by hand, and in the
process a network of streets lined
by townhouses with enclosed
courtyards were revealed.
MURAD KHANE: THE REBIRTH OF A COMMUNITY