[Most
of the gold is being carried on commercial flights destined for Dubai, according to airport security reports and
officials. The amounts carried by single couriers are often heavy enough that
passengers flying from Kabul to the Persian Gulf emirate would be well advised
to heed warnings about the danger of bags falling from overhead compartments.
One courier, for instance, carried nearly 60 pounds of gold bars, each about
the size of an iPhone, aboard an early morning flight in mid-October, according
to an airport security report. The load was worth more than $1.5 million. ]
 |
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Zalmai
for The New York Times
A
Kabul jewelry shop. Officials are concerned about gold being flown out of
Afghanistan.
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KABUL, Afghanistan — Packed into hand luggage
and tucked into jacket pockets, roughly hewed bars of gold are being flown out
of Kabul with increasing regularity, confounding Afghan and American officials
who fear money launderers have found a new way to spirit funds from the
country.
Most
of the gold is being carried on commercial flights destined for Dubai, according to airport security reports and
officials. The amounts carried by single couriers are often heavy enough that
passengers flying from Kabul to the Persian Gulf emirate would be well advised
to heed warnings about the danger of bags falling from overhead compartments.
One courier, for instance, carried nearly 60 pounds of gold bars, each about
the size of an iPhone, aboard an early morning flight in mid-October, according
to an airport security report. The load was worth more than $1.5 million.
The
gold is fully declared and legal to fly. Some, if not most, is legitimately
being sent by gold dealers seeking to have old and damaged jewelry refashioned
into new pieces by skilled craftsmen in the Persian Gulf, said Afghan officials
and gold dealers.
But
gold dealers in Kabul and current and former Kabul airport officials say there
has been a surge in shipments since early summer. The talk of a growing exodus
of gold from Afghanistan has been spreading among the business community here,
and in recent weeks has caught the attention of Afghan and American officials.
The officials are now puzzling over the origin of the gold — very little is
mined in Afghanistan, although larger mines are planned — and why so much
appears to be heading for Dubai.
“We
are investigating it, and if we find this is a way of laundering money, we will
intervene,” said Noorullah Delawari, the governor of Afghanistan’s central
bank. Yet he acknowledged that there were more questions than answers at this
point. “I don’t know where so much gold would come from, unless you can tell me
something about it,” he said in an interview. Or, as a European official who
tracks the Afghan economy put it, “new mysteries abound” as the war appears to
be drawing to a close.
Figuring
out what precisely is happening in the Afghan economy remains as confounding as
ever. Nearly 90 percent of the financial activity takes place outside formal
banks. Written contracts are the exception, receipts are rare and statistics
are often unreliable. Money laundering is commonplace, say Western and Afghan
officials.
As
a result, with the gold, “right now you’re stuck in that situation we usually
are: is there something bad going on here or is this just the Afghan way of
commerce?” said a senior American official who tracks illicit financial
networks.
There
is reason to be suspicious: the gold shipments track with the far larger
problem of cash smuggling. For years, flights have left Kabul almost every day
carrying thick wads of bank notes — dollars, euros, Norwegian kroner, Saudi
Arabian riyals and other currencies — stuffed into suitcases, packed into boxes
and shrink-wrapped onto pallets. At one point, cash was even being hidden in
food trays aboard now-defunct Pamir Airways flights to Dubai.
Last
year alone, Afghanistan’s central bank says, roughly $4.5 billion in cash was
spirited out through the airport. Efforts to stanch the flow have had limited
impact, and concerns about money laundering persist, according to a report released last week by the United States Special
Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
The
unimpeded “bulk cash flows raise the risk of money laundering and bulk cash
smuggling — tools often used to finance terrorist, narcotics and other illicit
operations,” the report said. The cash, and now the gold, is most often taken
to Dubai, where officials are known for asking few questions. Many wealthy
Afghans park their money and families in the emirate, and gold dealers say more
middle-class Afghans are sending money and gold — seen as a safeguard against
economic ruin — to Dubai as talk of a postwar economic collapse grows louder.
But
given Dubai’s reputation as a haven for laundered money, an Afghan official
said that the “obvious suspicion” is that at least some of the apparent growth
in gold shipments to Dubai is tied to the myriad illicit activities — opium
smuggling, corruption, Taliban taxation schemes — that have come to define
Afghanistan’s economy.
There
are also indications that Iran could be dipping into the Afghan gold trade. It is already buying up dollars and euros here to
circumvent American and European sanctions, and it may be using gold for the
same purpose.
Yahya,
a dealer in Kabul, said other gold traders were helping Iran buy the precious
metal here. Payment was being made in oil or with Iranian rials, which readily
circulate in western Afghanistan. The Afghan dealers are then taking it to
Dubai, where the gold is sold for dollars. The money is then moved to China,
where it was used to buy needed goods or simply funneled back to Iran, said
Yahya, who like many Afghans uses a single name.
He
declined to name those involved in aiding Iran. But Western officials said his
description of how the process worked tracked with their knowledge of money
laundering networks that operate in Afghanistan and the surrounding region.
Before
officials can say whether the gold shipments are part of an illicit financial
scheme, though, they first have to figure out how much gold is going out — or,
for that matter, coming in.
It
is a task easier said than done. The Finance Ministry, which is supposed to
collect taxes on each shipment, did not have figures, said Wahidullah Tawhidi,
a spokesman for the ministry. He suggested that the Commerce Ministry would
know. The Commerce Ministry did not, and officials there said it would be best
to contact airport customs officials.
At
the airport, a reluctant customs official, who spoke only on the condition of
anonymity, brushed aside concerns that there had been an uptick in gold
shipments out of Afghanistan. He then ended the conversation with the cryptic
promise to one day share “the real story of what is happening to the gold.”
M.Y.
Rassuli, the president of the airport, said shipments had begun increasing over
the summer. He said that he could not offer specifics because he deals with
operations, not customs. But he expressed frustration about the problem. “If
it’s 5 kilograms or 500 kilograms, that’s not a normal thing to transfer,” he
said in an interview. “This is why Afghanistan is No. 1 in corruption.”
Without
knowledge of how much gold is leaving, it is impossible to calculate the value
of the trade. But airport security forms that cover the last two weeks of
October indicate about 560 pounds, worth about $14 million, were carried by
hand out of Afghanistan during that period.
That
is a princely sum in one of the world’s 10 poorest countries. But it is perhaps
a measure of the current state of affairs in Afghanistan that seemingly no one
— not Afghan bank regulators, not American investigators of illicit financing,
not European economic experts — found it particularly surprising that gold
appears to have joined bank notes in the skies over Afghanistan.
The
addition of gold to the flight of cash from the country, the Afghan official
said, only proves that “if it is a thing that has value and we can put it in
our pocket, some of us are going to fly away with it.”
