KABUL, Afghanistan -- The Central Bank has the smell of a place in need
of a good cleaning.
The clock above the marble staircase is stuck at 12:35. The pots of
plastic geraniums in the lobby are filled with cigarette butts.
Men in white turbans and navy blazers sit on worn, gray couches, talking
in whispers and chain-smoking. A banker is asleep in a chair.
From behind a faux wood door comes a buzz that sends the men scurrying
into action. One grabs an appointment book, the other heads off to
prepare tea. Afghanistan's banking minister, Anwar Ahady, has summoned
his staff and he's not happy with them.
"I asked someone to send a letter of credit to a company that is
supposed to be printing money for us," Ahady says wearily. "I don't know
if he's capable of doing it."
Ahady sits inside a cavernous office that looks like the lair of a Cold
War bureaucrat. Burgundy drapes reach to the floor, allowing towering
shafts of light into the room. A small Afghan flag stands on his desk
and five phones are arranged in a semicircle on a nearby table. None of
them work.
About a month earlier, in March, Ahady left his life in the United
States --on the East Side of Providence -- and returned to Afghanistan,
his boyhood home. A political science professor at Providence College,
he was invited to head the effort to revive Afghanistan's Central Bank.
In Kabul, he reads textbooks about economic models and monetary policy
borrowed from his PC colleagues. He could use a book about chaos theory,
too.
AHADY HAD not seen Afghanistan since 1978, when he was in graduate
school in the United States. He longed to return but was turned away by
constant war and instability.
This winter, Hamid Karzai, the head of the interim Afghan government,
asked Ahady to run the bank. Ahady arranged for a sabbatical at PC,
packed his suits and flew to Kabul -- excited to see his native country.
Since his return, most of what Ahady sees comes through the tinted
windows of his Toyota Land Cruiser.
Two months ago, he could drive around the East Side without a second
thought. In Afghanistan, for security reasons, he rarely ventures beyond
his home and office.
Since the interim administration took power, the aviation minister was
killed by a mob at the Kabul airport, and the defense minister's convoy
bombed in Jalalabad. There's constant concern about Ahady's safety.
"Does it bother me?" he says. "Yes. It would bother anyone. But that's
public life in an insecure place."
Ahady lives with his in-laws inside a walled compound in Kabul. A guard
stands outside, a Kalashnikov rifle slung over his shoulder. Nomadic
sheep farmers, known as Kochi, huddle in the driveway, waiting to see
Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani, a spiritual leader and Ahady's father-in-law.
The compound was Gailani's home for years until the communist government
forced his family to leave the country in 1978. The communists turned
the property into their intelligence headquarters.
Not far away, Ahady began his political career at an outdoor rally,
decrying the growing influence of communists in the Afghan government
during the early 1970s. He was 17.
"When I was in 12th grade, I thought I could run the country," Ahady
says. "I thought I knew everything. I realize I knew nothing."
The son of a prominent judge, Ahady was in graduate school in Chicago
when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, attempting to prop up
the communist government.
Gailani became a rebel leader in the 10-year jihad against the Soviets.
The rebel groups, known collectively as the mujahideen, drove the
superpower out of their country.
After the Soviet withdrawal, a civil war erupted between the mujahideen
in 1992. The Taliban was able to restore a degree of order when it
seized power and established a hard-line Islamic state in 1996. As the
rest of the world turned away from Afghanistan, the Taliban invited al
Qaida to set up its headquarters here.
"For years, we had to fight an invading army," Gailani says of the
mujahideen. "What came after that was selfishness. They didn't have any
responsibility to God or the people."
Gailani and his group went into exile in Pakistan, while Ahady worked as
a professor in Rhode Island.
The fall of the Taliban and the intervention of the United States gave
both men the opportunity that had eluded them for years: returning to
Afghanistan with a chance at political power.
This winter, Gailani came back to his compound.
Dozens of his supporters followed him here, sleeping on the floors of
cement buildings with missing windows.
Surrounded by these men, Gailani has joined the struggle for influence
in the new government.
This week, more than 1,000 leaders representing different ethnic groups,
tribes and religious groups will meet in an assembly called the loya
jirga to choose the next head of state. It is a major test of the
fragile peace that has been forged among the Afghan factions.
Gailani and Ahady are leaders within the largest Afghan ethnic group,
the Pashtuns, which includes the interim leader, Karzai, and the
ex-king, Mohammad Zahir Shah.
The Pashtuns' chief rivals are the Tajiks, an ethnic minority formerly
of the Northern Alliance, who helped defeat the Taliban and who assumed
powerful positions in the interim government. The Tajiks are looking to
hold that power in the future.
"If we don't have a proper system of government," Gailani says,
"[violence] is inevitable."
EVERY MORNING, Ahady awakes for a jog around the compound, flanked by
two guards. By 8 a.m., he's whisked to the bank in his sleek, black SUV.
He rarely leaves his office, except for meetings in the royal palace and
the ex-king's residence and an occasional business trip outside the
country.
By 6 p.m., Ahady heads home, again under the watchful eye of his
bodyguard, Lalakhan, who left his family in Nangarhar, a province on the
Pakistan border, to protect Ahady, his cousin.
When Ahady arrives home, there's usually a line of people, mostly
Pashtuns, waiting to consult with him. They expect the new banking
minister to handle their crises, both great and small.
"They say, 'We came here to solve our problems,' " Ahady says. " 'Can
you talk to Mr. Karzai, can you do this for us, can you do that for us.'
" Recently, a group of commanders asked Ahady to resolve their dispute
with Northern Alliance soldiers who took their pickup trucks.
"These people are Pashtuns. They think I can help them," Ahady says.
"They come to me [to ask] if I would provide some kind of financial
support to them. I have a hard time supporting myself."
They ask him to deliver messages to Karzai, to the ex-king, to the
United Nations, to the U.S. government. The commanders heap praise on
Ahady, looking for favors, for patronage.
"Give me something, a connection or something," he says.
During the Taliban, Ahady earned a reputation in Afghanistan for his
pointed radio interviews, delivered from the United States, about his
country's troubles.
Ahady has become a self-proclaimed spokesman for the Pashtuns, who
complain they are being slighted by the Tajiks, who dominate the
government.
Many Pashtuns say Ahady is an articulate, Western-educated Afghan who
has returned to help rebuild his country. Others say Ahady trumpets the
cause of Pashtuns at the expense of other ethnic groups.
"I want all ethnic groups to be treated equally," he says. "But the
Pashtuns are really concerned, and their concerns have to be addressed.
"The way the war ended, the Northern Alliance got the upper hand, and
they are exploiting it."
Ahady remains defiant. He writes letters in his native Pashto, the
language used predominantly in the south. The ministries, run by the
former Northern Alliance officials, correspond in Farsi, the language of
Iran.
He wants to publish a journal geared toward Pashtuns, but the Interior
Ministry advised against the move in the current climate.
At his bank, officials from the Afghan intelligence service, also an arm
of the Northern Alliance, patrol the halls. Ahady says their only
purpose is to intimidate.
"It's a police state," he says. "These people are really just the KGB,
and they can do anything to you they want."
IT'S A COOL spring day in mid-April and the value of the Afghan
currency, called the afghani, is plummeting.
The money changers in the Shahzada Exchange Market say millions of new
afghanis appeared in the market, curiously timed with the return of
Mohammad Zahir Shah, the ex-king who abdicated his throne in 1973.
The influx caused the exchange rate to change by the hour. Over the
course of two days, the rate shifted from 36,000 afghanis per U.S.
dollar, to 34,000 afghanis to 37,000.
As banking minister, Ahady is the only person with authority to release
afghanis into circulation. But he didn't put them there. There are some
obvious suspects, but Ahady won't reveal any names.
For years, the Russian company that the bank uses to print money
continued to produce afghanis for Burhanuddin Rabbani, the former Afghan
president, even after his ouster by the Taliban. Rabbani remains a
political player as the loya jirga approaches.
The printer promised Ahady that it will print afghanis exclusively for
the Central Bank. "That's what the printer is telling us," Ahady says,
"but we don't know for sure."
Guns are not the only weapon in the struggle for power in Afghanistan.
Unauthorized money could prove an equally destabilizing force. If rival
groups decide to dump their bills into the market, the value of the
currency would sink further, and the economy could become more unstable.
Ahady is confident he can head off a crisis. A former commercial banker
with an MBA from Northwestern University, Ahady plans to retire the
current afghani and introduce new money, probably in four or five
months. But he said he wants to keep the actual date secret.
The key players in the interim government supported the idea of a new
currency, but could not agree on whose face to put on the new bills.
The problem is that Afghans, after decades of war and repression, cannot
agree on a national hero. Some officials wanted to put the slain
commander Ahmad Shah Massoud's portrait on the afghani. But Ahady, never
a fan of the Northern Alliance, took a neutral approach.
Instead of national heroes, the currency will feature national
landmarks: Shrines in Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif and the Salang Tunnel,
a mountain pass through northern Afghanistan where the traffic must head
south on one day and north on the next.
AHADY WISHES that his only problems were currency speculation and
foreign investment. But after years of neglect and incompetence, the
bank staff can barely perform basic functions.
"Out of the 3,500 people working for me, I can use not even five of
them," Ahady says.
And still, they come to work -- for jobs that pay about $1 a day.
The tellers stand at windows without customers.
There are only a handful of computers.
Ahady uses a mobile phone to communicate with bankers in the United Arab
Emirates, but he cannot speak with bank branches in Afghanistan because
there are no phone lines.
With time, Ahady expects that his staff will be trained and the bank's
services expanded. "It's going to be a tough few months," he says, "but
eventually, it will change." The U.S. Agency for International
Development promises to install a new phone system.
Fortunately, most of the bank's reserves were frozen in the United
States, the United Arab Emirates and England -- unavailable for the
Taliban to plunder. The bank had $200 million in reserves spread around
the world, a nest egg that Ahady considers sizable.
Ahady plans to stay in Afghanistan for the next two years during the
government's transitional period, depending on the outcome of the loya
jirga. He says Providence College has granted him a sabbatical for that
time. Eventually, Fatima Gailani, his wife, will join him here.
After turning down a job as minister of irrigation last fall, Ahady says
the bank post has proven to be far more influential than he expected.
Karzai, the interim Afghan head, and International Monetary Fund
officials, who are helping to rebuild Afghanistan, are extremely pleased
with his work, Ahady says.
The hardest part, he says, is the lack of personal freedom. He longs to
walk around Kabul and travel to the Shomali Plains, his family's former
home, north of the capital. But there are too many risks.
So Ahady sticks to his routine, shuttling between the bank and his
in-laws' compound. At the end of each day, the banking minister buzzes
for his assistant to fetch his car. His bodyguard meets him at his
office and hurries him down two flights of stairs and into the Land
Cruiser.
Ahady climbs into the back seat, closes the door and disappears -- a man
cloistered behind dark glass.
