From the New York Times‘s must-must read expose of the Karzai dynasty, a subsidiary of Kabul Bank:

…Initially, Mahmoud Karzai, the president’s brother, had no stake in the bank.

That changed at least three years ago, when the bank’s leaders, including Haseen Fahim, decided to lend Mahmoud Karzai at least $5 million in order to enable him to take an ownership stake in the bank. In the interview, Mr. Karzai said he thought there was nothing unusual about being lent such a large sum of money by a bank to buy shares in that bank. He said it had nothing to do with the fact that his brother was the president.

Later, Mahmoud and the brother of General Fahim’s brother started a cement company. Thanks to a $14 million loan from — wait for it — Kabul Bank. Now how do you figure that no one in the Karzai government noticed the bank’s rising insolvency?

Everything we needed to know about the corruption of the Karzais we knew after the stolen presidential election. The bank imbroglio clarifies it. Steve Clemons’ group’s proposal to (among many other things!) encourage broader political decentralization in Afghanistan looks attractive, but it’s not clear to me how strongly it can hedge against corruption as institutional as this. Then there’s the normative question of whether the U.S. should express a preference for how Afghans ought to constitute their governing institutions.