The gathering of hundreds of community leaders should be held in around two or three months, he said, adding that Afghanistan would not be dominated by the bigger power.
“The first condition of this strategic partnership is that they should bring us peace,” he said. “We have put forward many conditions and we have tied their hands and feet.”
Addressing a banking scandal that has jeopardized the country’s flow of aid, because of disputes with the IMF about how to handle it, Karzai warned that those responsible for bad loans would have to repay within a month or face prosecution. Politically well-connected Kabulbank lost hundreds of millions of dollars through fraud, bad loans and mismanagement until the scandal emerged late last year.
Among three senior shareholders and former executives of the failed bank now under investigation is Mohammad Haseen, the brother of Afghanistan’s First Vice President Mohammad Qasim Fahim. The president’s brother Mahmoud Karzai is a shareholder, but he is not under investigation in Afghanistan.
“Those who have committed these violations must be prosecuted,” Karzai told a news conference in the Afghan capital.
But he gave few concrete details about plans for Kabulbank — even though Afghanistan has agreed to break-up the lender — and repeatedly said international governments and institutions bore some responsibility for the bank’s failure.
His comments are likely to rile diplomats in Kabul, who have been at loggerheads with the Afghan government for months over the fate of the bank, and have long denied any role in the collapse of a private institution.
Karzai denounced a spectrum of wrongdoing by the bank’s managers but also warned of possible foreign corruption. “Internal and external factors played a role. (On the internal side) negligence, recklessness, lack of experience, lack of knowledge in dealing with banking,” he said, without mentioning corruption.
“Foreign advisors, their institutions, with their wrong advice, and also possibly involved in corruption, also contributed to the huge problems at Kabulbank.”
He also said the Afghan central bank would demand refunds from the United States and European nations, saying cash had been transferred there.
Western diplomats have criticized accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers’ failure to detect anything was amiss at the lender in an audit months before the scandal came to light, but say that was an issue between two private companies.
The Afghan government and central bank have always been responsible for supervising their own financial sector, and aware of that role, a senior US official with knowledge of the Kabulbank issue, told Reuters earlier this year.
International support has also been aimed at the financial sector overall rather than private banks, and focused on issues like money laundering and capacity building, added the official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the case.
Karzai’s government has long been plagued by accusations of endemic corruption which have strained ties with his Western backers. The Kabulbank crisis added a banking scandal to Afghanistan’s list of troubles, which also include a growing Taleban-led insurgency and political paralysis.
