Business Week, 18 December 2014
“The Americans started Matie [from Nawa district] on his road to prosperity”, writes Mujib Mashal, one of Afghanistan’s most outstanding journalists. Matie was part of a pattern. “As hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money poured into the country, it created a new class of wealthy, entrepreneurial Afghans. … Just like Russia’s oligarchs, many members of this wealthy class owe their fortunes to politics.”
Matie is one of them. §In 2009, Matie, then in his late 20s, trundled up to the Marine compound on a donkey… The son of a religious studies teacher, he had already tried many jobs, including joining the Taliban, twice. He had been working as a customer-care representative—making a lucrative $300 a month—with one of the new telecom companies when he realized he wanted to start his own company. He was sitting through a business development training seminar conducted by Malaysians … He quit and got a license to start a construction company. He wrote up a company profile and fact sheet—as the Malaysians had taught him—and, two weeks before Ramadan, put the papers in a saddle, mounted his donkey, and headed for the Marines in Nawa. “Hi, sir! Is there anybody to talk to me?” … The Marines had cash and lots of it. Congress has appropriated about $3.7 billion over the past 10 years for the Commanders Emergency Response Program (CERP), a fund that officers in Afghanistan and Iraq could draw on for “urgent humanitarian relief and reconstruction requirements in their areas of responsibility.”
His first project was the reconstruction of the district governor’s office. … Matie calculated an estimate on the spot: $10,109. … By 2012, Matie’s company had more than $2 million in the bank. It had delivered fertilizer and seeds; it had helped repair clinics, schools, and government buildings; and it had graded more than 77 kilometers of local roads, smoothing them with gravel. He also helped deliver USAID cash to far-flung districts as part of a jobs program called Cash for Work. He started other businesses as well, importing Iranian biscuits and shampoo from Nimroz, a large border province and hub for smugglers, distributing the products across the country. He invested his earnings abroad, including putting $100,000 into a bakery in the United Arab Emirates. He had become rich—thanks to American spending.
The article has other interesting figures: During the Taleban regime, “foreign currency was rare. There probably wasn’t even $2 million in the market,” says Khan Mohammad Baz, the head of the currency exchange union at Sarai Shahzada, Afghanistan’s central exchange market. “By 2003 there was probably $1 billion circulating.” These days, Baz says, about $20 million worth of business deals are made in a day. The central bank alone pumps about $60 million a week into the market to buy back the Afghan currency and keep it stable.
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This article was last updated on 9 Mar 2020
