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“President Joe Biden signed an order Friday to free $7 billion in Afghan assets now frozen in the U.S., splitting the money between humanitarian aid for poverty-stricken Afghanistan and a fund for Sept. 11 victims… Biden’s order calls for banks to provide $3.5 billion of the frozen amount to a trust fund for distribution through humanitarian groups for Afghan relief and basic needs. The other $3.5 billion would stay in the U.S. to finance payments from lawsuits by U.S. victims of terrorism that are still working their way through the courts…
“The United Nations last month issued an appeal for nearly $5 billion, its largest ever appeal for one country, estimating that nearly 90% of [Afghanistan’s] 38 million people were surviving below the poverty level of $1.90 a day. The U.N. also warned that upward of 1 million children risked starvation.” AP News
Many on all sides are critical of the decision to divert half the funds away from Afghanistan:
“Diverting $3.5 billion for 9/11 victims is theft. Certainly, the victims of al Qaeda terrorism deserve compensation, but the Afghan reserves belong to the Afghans who fought with the U.S. and against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Biden’s willingness to paint all Afghans as responsible for 9/11 is factually wrong if not racist…
“Afghanistan’s reserves belong to the Afghan people. President Ashraf Ghani may have fled, but the elected Afghanistan government remains the recognized government. The U.S. should direct Afghanistan’s trust fund to help the Ghani’s vice president consolidate control, support refugees outside Taliban control, fund consular services for those Afghans who have fled abroad, and organize resistance to the Taliban.”
Michael Rubin, Washington Examiner
“Families of 9/11 victims have legal claims against the Taliban, a militant extremist group that has seized power by force. Afghans never elected them; instead, they have endured great loss and suffering as a direct consequence of the ‘war on terror.’ For the past two decades, various Afghan forces have fought and died battling the Taliban. More than 71,000 Afghan civilians have died… The United States bears a sizable responsibility for this. The very least the Biden administration can do is release Afghan money to its rightful owners.”
H.A. Hellyer and Farid Senzai, Washington Post
“The United States government is looting assets legally held by another sovereign government to reward its own citizens. If another country pulled this move — and another country might be tempted to try it using this case as precedent — it would be viewed as outright theft. It makes it much easier for other great powers to act in a similarly imperial manner…
“The short-term implications of U.S. actions will be to free up some funds for humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan. The longer-term implication is to give other countries yet another reason to resent and fear the United States weaponization of the dollar. Because no matter what legal rationale is being provided, the federal government is stealing Afghanistan’s money.”
Daniel W. Drezner, Washington Post
Other opinions below.
“[The Taliban has] voiced disregard for the suffering of the Afghan people. Its prime minister, Mullah Hasan Akhund, declared in a speech that ‘the Taliban are not here to provide food for the people, but instead God will do that.’ Akhund said that the Taliban had only three major objectives — ‘exit of the US and its allies from Afghanistan, provision of security, and paving the way for a real Islamic system in the country.’ Building a functioning economy and attending to [its] people’s needs is not even a priority…
“Given that ideological predisposition, it is unlikely that unfreezing Afghanistan’s assets or turning on the spigot of aid would have a moderating influence on the Taliban’s behavior, towards its own people or in relation to international concerns about terrorism or drug-trafficking.”
Husain Haqqani, The Hill
“Proponents of providing humanitarian aid to Afghanistan stress that the aid would not be given to the regime or used to help the regime. That is a nice thought, but in reality, it does not work that way… Should the United States and other countries agree to the U.N. request, it risks saving the Afghan people today, only to condemn them to generations of Taliban oppression. That is not to say that nothing can or should be done. First and foremost, a plan needs to be drawn up to deal with the massive refugee flows that are already beginning to stem from this famine…
“Europe will not tolerate another refugee crisis like the one in 2015 that saw more than 1 million asylum seekers arrive on its shores. To avoid this, refugee camps need to be set up in neighboring countries, allowing starving Afghans to escape without the help of refugee smugglers and without overwhelming First World nations. These camps need to be financed by wealthy nations (as no neighboring country has any chance of shouldering the cost). This is also the only way to provide aid and keep it from falling into the hands of the Taliban.”
John Gustavsson, The Dispatch
“The countries where people have the greatest need for aid are often the same countries that are governed by the very worst people in the world… A vast network of U.N. agencies and NGOs works tirelessly to deliver aid to desperate people without enriching the kakistocracy that made them so desperate in the first place, but even when these organizations are not themselves corrupt or ineffectual, they too have to face the facts on the ground…
“How much of [the] $3.5 billion will be lost to overhead, petty corruption, and waste? It is far more expensive and less productive for an NGO to buy wheat from Iowa, ship it to Kabul, and dole bread out of the back of an aid truck than for Afghan farmers to obtain credit for seed grain from their own central bank.”
Jonah Shepp, New York Magazine
“Humanitarian relief is no substitute for a functioning, if floundering, economy. It is not merely that it raises the prospect of starving Afghans paying the salaries of western aid workers, and of a flood of food aid causing more long-term damage by crippling agriculture. The UN had already warned that the financial system could collapse within months; seizing the central bank’s assets could be the last straw. It’s true that those funds alone can’t solve Afghanistan’s underlying problems – but they are desperately needed to stave off some of the worst consequences.”
Editorial Board, The Guardian
“That Washington doesn’t want to release billions to the Taliban is understandable… But there are work-arounds to make sure an entire nation doesn’t slip into famine. As Human Rights Watch suggested on Feb. 11, the World Bank could require that all banking transactions are overseen by independent auditors to address concerns that providing the Afghan Central Bank with assets could enrich the Taliban… Biden’s administration needs to urgently rethink its decision and show some political will to help Afghanistan out of a crisis it helped create.”
Ruth Pollard, Bloomberg
