Out of all the actions the Biden administration could have taken on Afghanistan, commandeering the nation’s foreign currency reserves is, to put it mildly, unhelpful.
In an executive order signed Friday, President Joe Biden began the process of releasing the $7 billion in Afghan Central Bank funds held in the Federal Reserve. It froze those assets last August when the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan as American and NATO forces withdrew. His plan proposes directing $3.5 billion into a trust fund for humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan while putting the other $3.5 billion aside for families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S.
The problem is, the U.S. doesn’t own that money; Afghanistan does. That Washington doesn’t want to release billions to the Taliban is understandable. No one wants rivers of cash to go a regime that’s simply picked up where it left off two decades ago, restricting girls’ access to schools and universities, preventing women from working, abducting protesters and journalists from their homes and killing opponents.
