What's going on behind the scenes?
Days after
the Taliban drove into Kabul on August 15, its representatives started
making inquiries about the “location of
assets” of the central bank of the nation, Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), which are
known to total about $9 billion. Meanwhile, the central bank in
neighboring Uzbekistan, which has an almost equivalent population of
approximately 34 million people compared to Afghanistan’s population of more
than 39 million, has international reserves worth $35 billion. Afghanistan is a
poor country, by comparison, and its resources have been devastated by war and
occupation.
The DAB
officials told the Taliban that the $9 billion
are in the Federal Reserve in New York, which means that Afghanistan’s wealth
is sitting in a bank in the United States. But before the Taliban could even
try to access the money, the U.S. Treasury Department has already gone ahead
and frozen the DAB assets and prevented its transfer into Taliban
control.
The
International Monetary Fund (IMF) had recently allocated $650 billion Special Drawing
Rights (SDR) for disbursement around the world. When asked if Afghanistan would
be able to access its share of the SDRs, an IMF spokesperson said in an email, “As is always the case, the IMF is
guided by the views of the international community. There is currently a lack
of clarity within the international community regarding recognition of a
government in Afghanistan, as a consequence of which the country cannot access
SDRs or other IMF resources.”
Financial
bridges into Afghanistan, to tide the country over during the 20 years of war
and devastation, have slowly collapsed. The IMF decided to withhold transfer of $370 million before the
Taliban entered Kabul, and now commercial banks and Western Union have suspended money
transfers into Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s currency, the Afghani, is in a state
of free fall.
Over the
last decade, Afghanistan’s formal economy struggled to stay afloat. Since the
U.S.-NATO invasion of October 2001, Afghanistan’s government has relied on
financial aid flows to support its economy. Due to these funds and strong
agricultural growth, Afghanistan experienced an average annual growth rate of
9.4 percent between 2003 and 2012, according to the World Bank. These
figures do not include two important facts: first, that large parts of
Afghanistan were not in government control (including border posts where taxes
are levied), and second, that the illicit drug (opium, heroin, and
methamphetamine) trade is not counted in these figures. In 2019, the total
income from the opium trade in Afghanistan was between $1.2 billion and $2.1
billion, according to the United Nations Office
on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). “The gross income from opiates exceeded the value
of the country’s officially recorded licit exports in 2019,” stated a February
2021 UNODC report.
During the
past decade, aid flow into Afghanistan has collapsed “from around 100 percent of
GDP in 2009 to 42.9 percent of GDP in 2020.” The official economic growth rate
between 2015 and 2020 fell to 2.5 percent. The prospects for an increase in aid
seemed dire in 2020. At the 2020 Afghanistan Conference, held in Geneva in
November, the donors decided to provide annual
disbursements rather than aid in four-year packages. This meant that the Afghan
government would not be able to sufficiently plan their operations. Before the
Taliban took Kabul, Afghanistan had begun to recede from the memory of those
countries that had invaded it in 2001-2002.
During the
past 20 years, the United States government spent $2.26 trillion toward its war
and occupation of Afghanistan. European countries spent nothing close to what
the United States spent (Germany spent $19.3 billion by the end of
2018, of which $14.1 billion was to pay for the deployment of the German armed
forces).
The money
coming from all the donors into Afghanistan’s burgeoning aid economy had some
impact on the social lives of the Afghans. Conversations with officials in
Kabul over the years are sprinkled with data about increased access to schools
and sanitation, improvements in the health of children and greater numbers of
women in Afghanistan’s civil service. But it was always difficult to believe
the numbers.
In 2016,
Education Minister Assadullah Hanif Balkhi said that only 6 million Afghan
children attended the country’s 17,000 schools, and not 11 million as reported
earlier (41 percent of Afghanistan’s schools do not have buildings). As a result of the failure to provide
schools, the Afghan Ministry of Education reports that the total literacy rate
in the country was 43 percent in 2020, with 55 percent being the literacy rate
for men and 29.8 percent being the literacy rate for women. Donors, aid
agencies, and the central government officials produced a culture of inflating
expectations to encourage optimism and the transfer of more funds. But little
of it was true.
Meanwhile, opposite
to USSR's 10 years occupation (24 december 1979 to 15 February 1989) building roads, schools and hospitals, it is shocking to
note that there was barely any construction of infrastructure to advance basic
needs during these 20 years USA occupation. Afghanistan’s power company—Da
Afghanistan Breshna Sherkat (DABS)—reports that only 35 percent of the
population has access to electricity and that 70
percent of the power is imported at inflated rates.
Half of
Afghanistan lives in poverty, 14 million Afghans
are food insecure, and 2 million Afghan children are severely hungry. The
roaring sound of hunger was combined—during these past 20 years—with the
roaring sound of bombers. This is what the occupation looked like from the ground.
In a 2013, the
New York Times article, a U.S. official said, “The biggest source of corruption in
Afghanistan was the United States.” Dollars flowed into the country in trunks
to be doled out to politicians to buy their loyalty. Contracts to build a new
Afghanistan were given freely to U.S. businessmen, many of whom charged fees
that were higher than their expenditure inside Afghanistan.
Afghanistan’s
President Ashraf Ghani, who fled into exile hours before the Taliban took
control of Kabul, took office making a lot of noise about ending corruption.
When he fled the country, press secretary of the Russian embassy in Kabul
Nikita Ishchenko said that his people drove
four cars filled with money to the airfield. “They tried to stuff another part
of the money into a helicopter, but not all of it fit. And some of the money
was left lying on the tarmac,” according to a Reuters report. Corruption at the top
spilled down to everyday life. Afghans reported paying bribes worth $2.25
billion in 2020—37 percent higher than in 2018.
Part of the
reason for the Taliban’s rapid advance across Afghanistan over the course of
the past decade lies in the failure of the U.S.-NATO-backed governments of both
Hamid Karzai (2001-2014) and Ashraf Ghani (2014-2021) to improve the situation
for Afghans. Surveys regularly found Afghans
saying that they believed corruption levels were lower in Taliban areas;
similarly, Afghans reported that the Taliban would run schools more
effectively. Within Afghanistan, the Taliban portrayed themselves as more
efficient and less corrupt administrators.
None of this
allows anyone to assume that the Taliban have become moderate. Their agenda
regarding women is identical to what it was at its founding in 1994. In 1996,
the Taliban drove into Kabul with the same argument: they would end the civil
war between the mujahideen, and they would end corruption and inefficiency. The
US and its Western allies had 20 years to advance the cause of social
development in Afghanistan. Its failure opened the door for the return of the
Taliban.
The United States has begun to cut off Afghanistan from its own money in U.S. banks and from financial networks. It will use these means to isolate the Taliban. If US government deserved any trust, one could believe that perhaps this is a means to force the Taliban into a national government with former members of the Karzai-Ghani governments. Otherwise, these tactics may be plainly vindictive and will only backfire against the West – Daesh has just showed who the real enemy is and who Westerners, and Afghans, should be.afraid of.
PALESTINA
INTERACTIVE: Palestinian Remix
Palestinian Center for Human Rights
International Solidarity Movement – Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom
Defense for Children
Breaking the Silence
BRASIL
AOS FATOS: As declarações de Bolsonaro, checadas
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