City Life: Kabul

In Kabul

Perhaps the best way to view Corporate Afghanistan — there’s a term you don’t often hear — is to regard it as a never-ending spigot draining sovereign wealth funds into the world’s biggest tax haven. That’s the good part. The bad bit is that you might get killed enjoying it. The West tips about $5 billion of aid a year into Kabul — while Roshan, the Aga Khan-owned mobile phone operator, collects more revenue than the Afghan taxman. Very fast money is being made here, particularly by those working for multilateral agencies or a myriad of NGOs. They’re the ones who pay $10,000-a-month rents for half-built houses in Kabul’s (relatively) upmarket Wazir Akbar Khan district, once home to Osama and friends. With their jaded worldliness and guerrilla-chic outfits, they count their cash with consciences salved that they are also making the world a safer place — and don’t mind telling you so over the splendid Friday brunch at Kabul’s five-star Serena Hotel, also newly built by the Aga Khan, Afghanistan’s biggest private foreign investor.

Foreigners’ cash tends to be deposited at Standard Chartered Bank, with its ATM machine excitingly located along a street sometimes known as Sniper Alley. Serious Afghan money also tries to deposit itself with StanChart. The manager told me he once hosted a burly posse of potential customers who arrived with as many suitcases of $100 notes as they had Kalashnikovs. Leading them was a notorious Uzbek warlord who clearly had yet to grasp the intricacies of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act concerning transparency as to the provenance of his funds. My banker friend directed him towards a more appropriate establishment downtown — Kabulbank, which has become the country’s biggest bank in the two years since it opened.