It’s cheating, plain and simple. The Biden administration has set aside half of the $7 billion worth of Afghan assets, held in American banks, for the families of the 9/11 attack victims, besides allocating the remaining half to a UN-managed trust fund for humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan. This literally means that Washington has gobbled up half the money and ensured that the other half does not reach the Taliban leadership which is grappling with serious macroeconomic challenges as well as an ever-worsening humanitarian crisis in the country. The Afghan forex account in American banks thus stand closed.
While a whopping $3.5 billion have vanished outright, it is unclear how another $3.5 billion meant for humanitarian assistance will reach the implementing arms and flow down to some 23 million war-ravaged Afghans who are on the verge of starvation. These impoverished Afghans include millions of children who cannot crawl or stand due to extreme hunger and malnutrition; and according to a Unicef report released a month back, one million of these famishing children are facing the risk of death. This is a catastrophic situation which needs urgent attention rather than being addressed under a politically-motivated cumbersome mechanism.
The champion of human rights crafted a shrewd way out to address the calls to respect human lives and human dignity and deal with the exigency at hand without retreating from the political position it so illegally and unethically sticks to. But the calls for justice are only growing. While the move is being criticised within the US itself by people including families of the 9/11 attack victims, Afghan citizens also held a demonstration in Kabul against the “theft” and “cruelty” and demanded financial compensation for the tens of thousands of their countrymen killed during the 20 years of war. Pakistan too has raised its voice against the injustice, with the Foreign Office insisting that utilisation of Afghan funds should be the “sovereign decision of Afghanistan”.
The Biden administration has showed “the lowest level of humanity ... of a country and a nation”, if commented in the words of Taliban political spokesperson Mohammad Naeem.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 14th, 2022.
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