Following the American withdrawal, international funding for Afghanistan, equivalent to 40 percent of the country's GDP, was severed in compliance with sanctions from the U.S. and the U.N. Security Council. That delivered an almost globally unprecedented level of economic shock
to the war-torn nation, William Byrd, an economist specializing in Afghanistan at the U.S. Institute of Peace, told me. The U.S. also blocked access to billions of dollars of the Afghan government’s foreign currency reserves held in the U.S., worth more than a year’s worth of imports to a country heavily dependent on them.
Afghanistan has long been an impoverished country, but the exceptional nature of its current crisis is born of a deliberate policy regime designed to cripple it. While the soldiers and planes have left, the brutality of the U.S. war is continuing in a different form. The U.S. has transitioned from a hot war to an economic war
, Adam Weinstein, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute who focuses on security, trade and rule of law in Afghanistan and Pakistan, told me.
Collectively punishing the Afghan people through their economy is morally heinous: it marks the evolution of a project of imperial sadism against a people who have already endured tens of thousands of casualties and terror after decades of a vicious U.S. occupation that never needed to happen. It’s also backward as a geopolitical strategy: If the country collapses into a failed state, it will become vulnerable to takeover by the exact kind of ambitious terrorist organizations, like the Islamic State Khorasan, that drove the U.S. to war in the first place.
Zeeshan AleemThis is the sort of policy that drives distrust and outright hate of America abroad but is still pursued because of internal politics and fear of looking soft on the Taliban. Some 20 million people in Afghanistan are facing acute malnutrition, almost half of the country’s overall population, but the country can’t access its reserves, nor receive substantial international aid, because of the sanctions regime against the Taliban… In most cases, economic war ends up hurting the general population more than the governing elite, and rarely convinces the group holding power to change direction to obtain sanctions relief.
Similar sanctions are now levied against Russia, but as a much larger country with domestic production of food and fuel, Russia is much better equipped to withstand them – all the more reason why economic sanctions are rarely effective. Not to mention that a range of countries, from China to India and Brazil, are continuing trade relations with Russia, whereas Afghanistan has far fewer opportunities for commercial exchanges.
The money – which includes currency, bonds and gold – mostly comes from foreign exchange funds that accumulated over the past two decades when western aid flowed into Afghanistan. But it also includes the savings of ordinary Afghans, who are now facing growing violence and hunger with the economy and rule of law in freefall.
The 9/11 victims deserve justice but not from the Afghan people who themselves became pawns caught in the middle of the US-led ‘war on terror’ and an oppressive Taliban regime
, said Adam Weinstein, research fellow at the Quincy Institute, who also served as a US marine in Afghanistan.
The idea that overnight, the central bank reserves went from belonging to the Afghan people to being the transferable property of the United States is nothing short of colonial.
Nina Lakhani & Emma Graham-HarrisonThe situation of Afghanistan’s overseas foreign exchange reserves is further complicated by a series of lawsuits in the US by victims of the September 11th attacks seeking to seize the reserves as damages for the victims of terrorism. To me these lawsuits verge on the absurd: the judgements were delivered largely in absentia because the Taliban never appeared in court as defendants. And how could they? For the past 20 years they were in hiding from US occupation forces and engaging in militia attacks; has anyone even delivered a summon to a Taliban representative? If their representatives would have tried to appear in court they would have been arrested upon arrival in the US, and the sanctions regime likely prevented the Taliban from hiring legal counsel in the US. You can’t realistically have an impartial trial in the country that was attacked by terrorists, as no judge will rule against the victims. And to use this biased process to justify seizing another county’s property… hypocritical and immoral. The real justification is based on power, both military and economical, as few other countries would have the means to enforce a similar decision.
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