The decision on Friday, Feb. 11, by U.S. President Joe Biden to seize the assets of Da Afghanistan Bank, the country’s central bank, deposited in the United States and frozen since the return to power of the Taliban in August 2021, has not only aroused the ire of the Taliban. Besides “serious legal questions,” many NGOs warn that it puts humanitarians “in grave danger.”
Quoted by Le Monde, Filipe Ribeiro, the head of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders; MSF) in Kabul, said the decision “makes NGOs potentially guilty of receiving stolen goods” since these reserves belong to Afghanistan. “From a legal point of view and in terms of its feasibility, there is nothing to say that the United States will be able to carry out this project.” According to him, to do so is to risk plunging the country into chaos. “The reserves of a central bank are used to support the currency, the economy and the banking system; to deprive it of them, when Afghanistan is already suffering from a serious liquidity crisis, is to bring it down.”
The director general of Action Against Hunger Jean-François Riffaud, who was in Kabul, assures us that his organization “will never finance [its] operations on the basis of this manna, because it would put [them] in an extremely dangerous situation with regard to the Taliban authorities and the Afghans themselves, who could consider them as accomplices in a theft.” Even feminist NGOs hostile to the Afghan Islamist regime, he adds, have demonstrated against the U.S. decision, considered contrary to the interests of the Afghan people.
Also the French government’s position, which limits its support to emergency aid and refuses to finance any development project, on the grounds that this would constitute a political endorsement of the Taliban regime, has provoked angry reactions. “It is absurd,” observes Mr. Ribeiro, “the nations that have made this country a rentier state by keeping it on life support suddenly decide to cut off its supplies.” For Action Against Hunger, “the French position is incomprehensible, we are not negotiating with a regime, but with a country.”