On the first floor of a 60-year-old yellow brick building in downtown Kabul, a half-dozen men in suits and ties huddle on velvet chairs to plot the future of Afghanistan's central bank.
They don't have much to work with. Fleeing Taliban troops emptied the vault of US$5.3 million and US$$69,000 of afghanis and Pakistani rupees, said Khulan Mohammed Faiz, the bank's general secretary. "Now we have approximately 5 billion afghani left in our safe," he said, or about US$140,000.
After more than 20 years of unrest, the last five under the Taliban, Afghanistan's financial system is in shambles.
The bank's main asset is its marble-floored building on Furujga Street, built in 1939. Its few staffers may be ill-prepared to participate in the proposed five-year, US$6.5 billion UN project to rebuild the country.
"The central bank exists now just in the form of a building and a limited staff," said Abdul Haq Amiri, an Afghan economist who attended a conference on rebuilding Afghanistan held this week in Islamabad.
Reconstruction money is expected to start flowing soon. World Bank officials, fearful that most of it will end up in the hands of warlords who are reasserting their regional authority in the wake of the Taliban's defeat, want to establish a trust fund.
The central bank won't be directly involved. Instead, an international institution such as the World Bank will administer the fund, World Bank officials said.
The other parts of Afghanistan's financial system are also troubled.
"There is something called the Ministry of Finance, but most people have left," said William Byrd, the World Bank's acting country director for Afghanistan. "It doesn't do what ministries of finance do -- collect money and spend it."
Fixing the nation's finances may also have to take a back seat to efforts to craft an interim government. Four opposition factions, including the Northern Alliance, are meeting near Bonn this week for UN-sponsored talks to decide who will sit in an assembly that will govern Afghanistan through the winter.
Then there is the afghani. There are two versions of the national currency. One was produced by the Taliban. The other, controlled by the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, is printed in Russia, a holdover from the days of Soviet rule in Afghanistan.
The notes are identical, except for serial numbers. Before the central bank can manage the currency, as its counterparts do the world over, the nation must decide whether to retain the afghani or create a new currency.
The afghani trades at about 36,000 afghanis to the US dollar; just before the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the rate was 67,000 afghanis to the dollar. On Kabul's streets, traders clutch foot-thick stacks of notes and seek business from the hundreds of foreign aid workers and journalists who arrived after the Taliban fled.
"One has to decide early on if the afghani is a viable currency," said Henri Ghesquiere, the International Monetary Fund's representative for Pakistan. It may have "a couple of zeros too many."
Regardless how the currency is managed, Afghanistan also needs to start hiring civil servants, opening schools and generating revenue as it shifts to a legitimate economy from one dominated by the opium trade, gun-running and smuggling.
The nation has US$48 million in overseas debt, most of it owed to the World Bank and the IMF.
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