KABUL (Pajhwok): The US president has inked an executive order freeing up $7 billion in frozen Afghan central bank reserves to be split between humanitarian assistance to the Afghan people and American victims of terrorism, including relatives of 9/11 attacks.
President Joe Biden’s executive order requires banks to provide $3.5 billion of the blocked money to a trust fund for distribution through humanitarian groups for Afghan relief. The remaining $3.5 billion would stay in the US to finance payments from lawsuits by American victims of terrorism, the Associated Press reported.
Friday’s presidential order is designed to provide a path for the funds to reach the people of Afghanistan, while keeping them out of the hands of the Taliban and malicious actors, the White House said in a statement.
However, the Taliban hit out at the Biden government for not freeing up all the reserves of the Da Afghanistan Bank, assets that belong to the people, currently faced with a grave humanitarian crisis.
Mohammad Naeem, the government’s political spokesman based in Doha, tweeted: “Stealing the blocked funds of Afghan nation by the United States of America and its seizure shows the lowest level of humanity.”
In the United States alone, Afghanistan has more than $7 billion in frozen reserves. The remainder of the amount is in Germany, the United Arab Emirates and Switzerland.
In January, the United Nations sought about $5 billion, its largest ever appeal for one country. About 90% of the country’s 38 million people were surviving below the poverty level ($1.90 a day), the world body said, warning that more than a million children ran the risk of starvation.
The New York Times reported the convoluted plan was designed to deal with many legal impediments caused by the 2001 terrorist attacks and the muddled end to the 20-year conflict in Afghanistan.
The newspaper quoted Dr Shah Mohammad Mehrabi, a longtime member of the bank’s board and economics professor at Montgomery College in Maryland, as saying: “You’re talking about moving toward a total collapse of the banking system. I think it’s a shortsighted view.”
A group of relatives of 9/11 victims, who won a default verdict against the Taliban and Al-Qaida years ago, tried to seize the reserves. They convinced a judge to dispatch a US marshal to serve the Federal Reserve with a writ of execution to seize the Afghan money.
Having intervened in the lawsuit, he Biden administration is likely to tell the court that the victims’ claims to 50 percent of the funds should be heard. If the judge agrees, the US president will seek to direct the remainder toward some sort of trust fund to be spent on food and other humanitarian aid in Afghanistan.
NYT believed: “The process is likely to be long and messy, with advocates and some 9/11 victims arguing that the Afghan assets should all go to help the Afghan people who are facing mounting hardship.”
PAN Monitor/mud
Hits: 30