Commentary: Plundering of Afghan assets by Americans is blatant theft

U.S. President Joe Biden recently signed an order to free up $7 billion in Afghan assets now frozen in the U.S., splitting the money between a fund for victims of the 9/11 attacks and a trust fund to help the people of Afghanistan.

The order, upon its adoption, brought about heated discussions in the international community, with the hashtag “The United States is stealing Afghanistan’s money” having become a heatedly debated issue on Twitter.

Ajmal Ahmady, former head of Afghanistan’s central bank, revealed on social media that Afghanistan has some $9 billion in foreign reserves and that the majority of that amount – some $7 billion – is being held in banks on U.S. soil.

Before the U.S. completely withdrew its forces from Afghanistan, the U.S. government announced plans to freeze the foreign reserves held by Afghanistan’s central bank. Among the frozen reserves, there are rescue funds Afghanistan had received from the international community as well as the savings of ordinary Afghan people. The bank has claimed that the money belongs to the Afghan people, not any government organizations, political parties or any other organizations.

The White House explained that families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks had filed lawsuits against the Taliban, which they held responsible for the death of their beloved ones, having also sought compensation from the assets of Afghanistan’s central bank in the U.S. The Biden administration has since indicated its support for such appeals.

However, what the White House said has not been consistent. According to a report by the New York Times, what makes the White House’s statement complicated and self-contradictory is that the U.S. has never recognized the Taliban as a legitimate government in Afghanistan, so if the frozen funds do not belong to the Taliban, how can they possibly be used as compensation for the victims of the 9/11 attacks?

In 2001, U.S.-led military forces invaded Afghanistan, having inflicted suffering on the Afghan people. More than 30,000 innocent civilians were killed during the Afghanistan War and about 11 million people became refugees.

In 2021, the U.S. decided to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan. The 20 years of war in Afghanistan destroyed the peaceful lives the Afghan people could have otherwise enjoyed, bringing devastation and desolation to the country. Statistics from the UN World Food Programme showed that 22.8 million Afghans now face life-threatening food shortages, and about 3.2 million Afghan children under five years old suffer from malnutrition.

At this critical moment, the U.S. did not shoulder its due responsibility to help the Afghan people alleviate their humanitarian crisis. Instead, it openly plundered the country’s assets, while further aggravating the suffering of the Afghan people. What the U.S. has done, by arbitrarily freezing Afghan assets and even taking the assets as its own, is tantamount to stealing money from Afghanistan.

These assets are considered “life-saving” money for the Afghan people, and yet they are now being used as nothing but a tool of the U.S. to create political benefits for its own country. According to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a U.S. think tank, Biden’s decision to freeze and then redistribute Afghanistan’s reserves was a political move designed to show his Republican opponents how tough he can be on the Taliban.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin noted that the behavior of the U.S. has testified to the essence of the so-called rules-based international order as touted by the Americans. U.S. behavior has revealed just what order it actually is – an order of power politics devised for the purpose of maintaining U.S. hegemony.

As a matter of fact, not all the relatives of victims of the 9/11 attacks had sought compensation, with some of them having expressed the hope that the Biden administration could retract the relevant decisions it has since made.

 “We can’t bring our loved ones back,” Barry Admunson, who lost his brother in the 9/11 attack, told the media. “But we can save the lives of people in Afghanistan by advocating that the Biden Administration release this money to its rightful owners: the Afghan people.”

The blood debt the U.S. owes to Afghanistan is too enormous to count.