US-based professor new Afghan central bank chief

Dr Anwar Ahady, 51, at present a professor of Politics and International Relations at Rhode Island's Providence College, said he accepted the position without any misgivings as a patriotic gesture to his Afghan homeland.

But he faces a huge challenge in a country where the banking system has not changed since the 1940s, economic statistics - the life-blood of any central banker - are non-existent and there are a number of currencies in circulation printed by rival warlords.

Undeterred, he joins a growing list of Afghans long based abroad, particularly in the United States, returning home to key posts.

Dr Ahady, who worked for the now defunct Continental Bank of Chicago in its lending department in the 1980s, received his high school education in Kabul before embarking on an education that took him from the American University in Beirut to North Western University outside Chicago where he also earned an MBA.

Writing his thesis on Gulf Security and the impact of oil wealth on the societies of Middle East producers, Dr Ahady also holds a PhD in political science.

Dr Ahady is from an upper middle-class Kabul family - his father was a Supreme Court judge - and initially turned down the post of Irrigation Minister in interim leader Hamid Karzai's government because he did not think his skills suited the job.

A Pashtun, like Karzai, he was involved in the UN-sponsored Bonn Conference last December that installed the present government.

"I am a patriot and still have an Afghan passport so I had no doubts about taking this post," he told Reuters.

A fluent English speaker and looking every inch an immaculately dressed Western banker, Dr Ahady said he had taken a two-year leave of absence from Providence College where he has taught since 1994.

Dr Ahady said getting the printing of Afghanistan's many currencies under control was his most pressing and sensitive task.

"I hope by the end of the year we can have a single currency," he said.

Powerful provincial warlords print their own money and follow their own agendas that take no account of orders from Kabul.

Dr Ahady is also not sure about unemployment and inflation rates, how much the country owes in foreign debt and how many people are printing money besides the central bank.

The radical Islamic Taleban regime, ousted in December, published no economic data during its five-year rule.

Estimates of the cost of the mammoth rebuilding effort required for Afghanistan range from $10 billion to $40 billion and beyond.

With some $4.5 billion in foreign aid pledges slow in coming, a budget has yet to be drafted for the new Afghan year that began this month. Prioritising key projects for when the funds arrive has only just begun.

The Taleban outlawed interest as un-Islamic, using banks only to collect revenues and pay salaries. The new administration is trying to train staff and computerise data now in hand-written logbooks.