KOHAT, Aug 20: The National Bank of Pakistan in Kabul has earned a profit of Rs 10 million with deposits reaching over Rs one billion in seven months.

The NBP branch manager in Kabul, Syed Mahmoodur Rehman while talking to Dawn exclusively here on Friday termed Kabul as a land of opportunities with depth for all kind of investments.

He said that Afghanistan is gradually becoming a huge market with bright prospects for Pakistani exporters. He said that people were exporting mostly those finished goods where the government had announced a rebate.

He said that Pakistan was the first country to open a bank branch there and now other countries are following suit. Since December last when NBP opened its branch in Kabul, several Pakistani, Indian and local banks have been opened.

In the near future Iranian banks will also open businesses in Kabul which clearly indicates that the situation in Kabul was improving and its neighbours want to see it as a prospering country and play their due role in its development.

He said that most of the depositors were foreign NGOs and embassies but much was needed to be done to encourage the business community to make transactions through banks in a legal manner.

He said that the trade volume between the two countries was recorded at 600 million dollars in financial year 2003 which was expected to cross a billion dollar mark during the current fiscal. However the undocumented trade which was in billions of dollars required government attention to legalise it and earn tax from it.

He said law and order was slowly improving and the Afghan government had made fool-proof arrangements for the security of foreign nationals, especially Pakistanis. To a question he said that the government of Pakistan had given extraordinary incentives to bankers in Afghanistan. The salary pacakge was the same as in New York.

Another official of the bank, Mohammad Ali Paracha said: "The situation in Kabul was very different from other parts of the country where fighting is going on between warlords and the allied troops with remnants of Al Qaeda and Taleban. In Kabul one can see people of different colors, races and religions and the locals have now learnt how to deal with them in their day-to-day life."

About the general situation in Kabul he said the price of the property was going up in Kabul and some Pakistanis had also set up their offices there and were doing business. Most of them were doing business in partnerships with local people.

Life in Kabul could be compared with any other big city because mostly foreigners and big businessmen were staying there. The people, even the kiosk owners were open-minded and sold all sorts of drinks.

During his seven-month long stay there he had felt that the northern part of the country was calm as compared to the south. The people in the north and Kabul were more liberal than the conservative south and southeast. This he noticed from the people roaming in Kabul, the majority of whom belonged to the north.

A Peshawar-based currency dealer told Dawn that hundreds of Afghans daily took millions of rupees through illegal means to Afghanistan without any check at the border. Each carrier used to take as much as Rs two million on his body to Kabul as there was no checking at the border.