The Offer

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG

KABUL—More than $3 billion in cash has been openly flown out of Kabul International Airport in the past three years, a sum so large that U.S. investigators believe top Afghan officials and their associates are sending billions of diverted U.S. aid and logistics dollars and drug money to financial safe havens abroad.

The cash—packed into suitcases, piled onto pallets and loaded into airplanes—is declared and legal to move. But U.S. and Afghan officials say they are targeting the flows in major anticorruption and drug trafficking investigations because of their size relative to Afghanistan's small economy and the murkiness of their origins.

Officials believe some of the cash, if not most, is siphoned from Western aid projects and U.S., European and NATO contracts to provide security, supplies and reconstruction work for coalition forces in Afghanistan. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization spent about $14 billion here last year alone. Profits reaped from the opium trade are also a part of the money flow, as is cash earned by the Taliban from drugs and extortion, officials say.

The amount declared as it leaves the airport is vast in a nation where the gross domestic product last year totaled $13.5 billion. More declared cash flies out of Kabul each year than the Afghan government collects in tax and customs revenue nationwide. "It's not like they grow money on trees here," said a U.S. official investigating corruption and Taliban financing. "A lot of this looks like our tax dollars being stolen. And opium, of course."

Most of the funds passing through the airport are being moved by often-secretive outfits called "hawalas," private money transfer businesses with roots in the Muslim world stretching back centuries, officials say.

The officials believe hawala customers who have sent millions of dollars of their money abroad include high-ranking officials and their associates in President Hamid Karzai's administration, including Vice President Mohammed Fahim, and one of the president's brothers, Mahmood Karzai, an influential businessmen.

Where they allegedly get the money is one of the questions under investigation.

Vice President Fahim, responded through his brother, A.H. Fahim, a businessman, who denied the allegations. "My brother? He doesn't know anything about money," Mr. Fahim said.

Mahmood Karzai said in an interview he has engaged in only legitimate businesses and has never transferred large sums of cash from the country.

In a Jan. 22 financial disclosure form that he gave the Wall Street Journal to review, Mr. Karzai declared his net worth was $12,157,491 with assets of $21,163,347 and liabilities of $9,006,106. He reported an annual income of just over $400,000 but didn't provide dates.

Mahmood Karzai, an American citizen, blamed the allegations that he was transferring illicitly earned cash from Afghanistan on political opponents.

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Well, what we're looking at here is opportunity. Right now America is almost broke, so we need money bad. Who has a lot of money, duh, did you read the article? Now it just so happens that we have a whole hell of a lot of tough guys with guns in Afghanistan right now. What are they doing? They're protecting Afghanistan. Only problem is they're being led by a bunch of goody two-shoes, boy-scout generals

What we gotta do is this. We swap out all of them generals and put in our own capos. Then we go see president Hamid Karzai an' we make him an offer: "Ya got a nice little country here Hammy, it'd be a real shame if somethin' wuz t' happen to it." What's he gonna do, he needs protection, he's gonna buy it. I figure he's good for $500,000,000 a month. He don't payup, we go find some raghead warlord who will and he's the new president.