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Afghanistan's biggest private bank -- founded by the Islamic nation's
only world-class poker player -- celebrated its fifth year in business last summer with
a lottery for depositors at Paris Palace, a Kabul wedding hall.
Prizes awarded by Kabul Bank included nine apartments in the Afghan capital and cash gifts totaling more than $1 million. The bank trumpeted the event as the biggest prize drawing of its kind in Central Asia.
Less publicly, Kabul Bank's boss has been handing out far bigger prizes to his country's U.S.-backed ruling elite: multimillion-dollar loans for the purchase of luxury villas in Dubai by members of President Hamid Karzai's family, his government and his supporters.
The close ties between Kabul Bank and Karzai's circle reflect a defining feature of the shaky post-Taliban order in which Washington has invested more than $40 billion and the lives of more than 900 U.S. service members:
a crony capitalism that enriches politically connected insiders and dismays the Afghan populace.
Afghan laws prohibit hidden overseas lending and require strict accounting of all transactions. But those involved in the Dubai loans, including Kabul Bank's owners, said the cozy flow of cash is not unusual or illegal
in a deeply traditional system underpinned more by relationships than laws.
Kabul Bank prospers because
Afghanistan, though extremely poor, is in places awash with cash, a result of huge infusions of foreign aid, opium revenue and a legal economy that, against the odds, is growing at about 15 percent a year. The vast majority of this money flows into the hands of a tiny minorityhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...?nav=rss_email/components&sid=ST2010022104340 -- some of it through legitimate profits, some of it through kickbacks and insider deals that bind the country's political, security and business elites.
