American Promoted Kabul Bank a "Ponzi Scheme."

KABUL, Afghanistan — Kabul Bank became Afghanistan’s largest financial institution by offering the promise of modern banking to people who had never had a saving or checking account. What it really dealt in was modern theft: “From its very beginning,” according to a confidential forensic audit of Kabul Bank, “the bank was a well-concealed Ponzi scheme.”

Afghan and American officials had for years promoted Kabul Bank as a prime example of how Western-style banking was transforming a war-ravaged economy. But the audit, prepared this year for Afghanistan’s central bank by the Kroll investigative firm, gives new details of how the bank instead was institutionalizing fraud that reached into the hundreds of millions of dollars and obliterated Afghans’ trust after regulators finally seized the bank in August 2010 and the theft was revealed.

According to this NYTimes article, Kabul Bank has committed fraud in amounts as high as hundreds of millions.

Here is another example of a failure during the war on terror and nation building that followed.

Another example that indicates economic motivations beyond "defense."

Audit report conducted by Kroll

Going further than previous reports, the audit asserts that Kabul Bank had little reason to exist other than to allow a narrow clique tied to President Hamid Karzai’s government to siphon riches from depositors, who were the bank’s only substantial source of revenue.

So Afghans we're taking a ton of money off the top...where do you think it went? Funding extremists? Opium farms?

What Kroll’s audit found is that on Aug. 31, 2010, the day the Bank of Afghanistan seized Kabul Bank, more than 92 percent of the lender’s loan portfolio — $861 million, or roughly 5 percent of Afghanistan’s annual economic output at the time — had gone to 19 related people and companies, according to the audit.

I have the utmost faith that these groups were taking money for the good of the people, to help the struggling

For many Afghans, the scandal surrounding Kabul Bank, a linchpin of the economic order established here by Americans and their allies, has cemented the opinion that the United States brought crony capitalism, not free markets, to Afghanistan.

Not unreasonable...

Kabul Bank did serve some legitimate functions — for instance, the United States paid the salaries of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, police and teachers through it.

Oh, okay.

The Conspiracy? Well...banks...are...bad..sometimes.

And so is interventionist, nation building foreign policy.


(Note: 2 year old story. New report filed today with supplementary details.