Afghan President Hamid Karzai attended the ground-breaking ceremony for a 39-million-dollar, five-star hotel here on Saturday.
The four-storey, 200-room Hyatt Regency hotel, a rare taste of luxury in war-torn Afghanistan, will be a new Kabul landmark opposite the US embassy.
"The ground-breaking for the Hyatt hotel proves a very important fact: Afghanistan is open for business," said Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to Afghanistan.