In the spring of 2009, as the reëlection campaign of President Hamid Karzai was gathering momentum, a group of prominent Afghan businessmen met with the candidate for breakfast at the Presidential palace. Among them was Khalil Ferozi, the chief executive officer of Kabul Bank, a freewheeling financial institution owned by some of the most colorful and politically well-connected Afghans in the country, including one of President Karzai’s brothers.
Ferozi, a banking novice, had a history that seemed lifted from a Saturday-afternoon adventure movie. In the late nineteen-nineties, working for the legendary anti-Taliban commander Ahmed Shah Massoud, he sold emeralds mined in the crags of the Panjshir Valley and used the proceeds to pay an obscure Russian company to print truckloads of Afghan currency. In this way, he helped underwrite Massoud’s movement. But, according to a Massoud associate, the commander became enraged when he discovered that Ferozi was helping to print currency for the Taliban as well. Before Ferozi could be hauled in—“Tie his hands, tie his legs, and bring him to me,” Massoud reportedly said—Massoud was killed, on September 9, 2001, by Al Qaeda assassins. Ferozi denied the story and went on to become Kabul’s most improbable C.E.O. With a body like an oil drum, and a retinue of gunmen around him, he prowls the streets of Kabul looking less like a banker than like a footballer lost in a war zone.
“We’d like to contribute to the campaign,” Ferozi told President Karzai at the breakfast in 2009. “What can we do?” The President pointed Ferozi in the direction of his finance minister and campaign treasurer, Omar Zakhilwal.
Read the rest: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_filkins
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