WASHINGTON, United States -- America’s war in Afghanistan
is over, but the fight over the Taliban’s finances is only beginning.
The fate of billions of dollars of international reserves and
foreign aid represents its own set of politically and legally fraught decisions
as the world comes to grips with what Afghanistan will look like under Taliban
rule.
اضافة اعلان
The stakes are extraordinarily high as millions of Afghans face
the prospect of becoming collateral damage from a stranglehold of sanctions on
the Taliban that remain in place, threatening to sink an economy that the US
has spent two decades trying to prop up.
With a humanitarian crisis looming, the Biden administration is
reviewing how to tailor that web of sanctions so that aid can continue to reach
the Afghan people. The challenge is how to let donor money continue to flow
without further enriching the Taliban, which the US considers a terrorist
organization.
Experts say that such a situation, in which a group deemed to be
terrorists takes over an entire country, is without precedent and poses a
complex test for the
US' sanctions program.
“This is a new world,” said Adam Smith, a senior sanctions
official in the Obama administration’s Treasury Department. “I can’t think of
any case in which a terrorist group that’s already designated became the power
in charge of a full country.”
He explained that the Treasury Department must soon decide what
exceptions, or licenses, it would grant for certain kinds of transactions. It
must also determine whether all of Afghanistan, or only the Taliban leadership,
remains under sanctions so that the world knows how to engage with the
government.
“We need to find a way to encourage goods and services into
Afghanistan, or you’re going to have 30 million Afghans having collateral
consequences here, and that’s going to be disaster,” Smith said.
As the Taliban swept into power last month, the US swiftly acted
to maintain as much leverage as possible. It blocked the Taliban's access to
$9.5 billion in international
reserve funds and pressured the International
Monetary Fund to suspend distribution of more than $400 million in currency
reserves.
A Treasury Department official said the US was not easing
sanctions pressure on Taliban leaders or the significant restrictions on their
access to the international financial system.
The militant group continues to be classified as a specially
designated global terrorist group, and they are also under United Nations
sanctions, which the US and other countries must enforce.
But a desire to demonstrate some flexibility is already
apparent. In the past week, the Treasury Department has signaled to
humanitarian organizations that it is taking steps to permit aid work that
benefits the Afghan people to continue.
On August 25, the agency issued a specific license, similar to
what it has issued in places such as Syria and Venezuela, to allow for the
delivery of food, shelter, medicine and medical services to Afghanistan.
There are also signs that financial flows into the country,
which have been shut off for the past two weeks, are resuming.
Financial institutions in the US have been waiting for the Biden
administration to clarify whether the property of Afghanistan is considered the
property of the Taliban, banking industry officials said. Banks are concerned
that they could be in violation of US sanctions if they facilitate transactions
with the country.
But Western Union said Thursday that it would resume
money-transfer services into Afghanistan so that its customers could send money
to loved ones and that it would waive fees for wiring money into the country
for two weeks.
A company spokesperson said it made the decision after the US
government indicated that remittances to Afghanistan were permissible.
A Treasury Department official confirmed that the agency had
contacted financial institutions to relay that personal remittances were
allowed.
The Treasury Department does have experience trying to allow
help to reach populations that are ruled by hostile governments and has issued
licenses for humanitarian aid to arrive to such places. In June, it issued
licenses allowing supplies for combating the coronavirus to be shipped to Iran,
Syria and Venezuela.
A terrorist group presents its own challenges, however, and
keeping aid money out of the hands of the Taliban will not be easy, especially
if they control the country. The group is notorious for pilfering the wealth of
Afghanistan’s citizens with exorbitant taxes, and an influx of food or medicine
from abroad would be an opportunity for seizing and selling them to raise
funds.
Strict sanctions could also compel the Taliban to rely even more
heavily on illicit finance and the drug trade, despite their public disavowal
of such practices.
“There needs to be greater engagement on anti-money-laundering
and countering the financing of terrorism because of the heightened risk posed
by the Taliban takeover,” said Alex Zerden, the Treasury Department’s financial
attache at the US Embassy in Kabul, from 2018 to 2019.
The complexity of addressing the situation in Afghanistan comes
as the Treasury Department conducts a broader review of its sanctions program.
Critics have faulted the previous administration for haphazardly imposing
sanctions, often undercutting their effectiveness.
The Biden administration has said it is not conducting an
intelligence review of specific sanctions, but rather focusing on ways to
modernize the practice so that it is more effective.
The Treasury Department has offered no timeline for that review.
It is taking place as Republicans in the Senate have stalled two of President
Joe Biden’s nominations for top sanctions roles in the Treasury Department, Brian
Nelson and Elizabeth Rosenberg.
Although the Biden administration has been less vocal than the
Trump administration about its use of sanctions, it is still on pace to make
about 1,000 designations this year, according to the law firm Gibson, Dunn
& Crutcher.
Any sanctions relief for the
Taliban could come with a political
price.
Republican Senators Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Rob Portman (Ohio),
urged Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Monday to keep any internationally
held assets belonging to Afghanistan from the Taliban.
“The Taliban are sponsors of terrorism who maintain close ties
with Al-Qaida, and therefore they cannot be trusted to distribute money to the
Afghan people who desperately need it, and will instead use any and all funds
to actively advance priorities hostile to US interests,” they wrote in a
letter.
“We can and should work to establish alternative means of
supporting the Afghan people, but we cannot allow any resources to be used to
bolster an oppressive Taliban regime.”
Khalid Payenda, who last month resigned as Afghanistan’s finance
minister, said Thursday during an event at Georgetown University’s School of
Foreign Service that the Taliban appeared to be struggling to restart the
government’s financial operations and that the country would soon run out of
money.
He said that the world must find ways to give economic support
to the people of Afghanistan without giving the money to the Taliban and that
sanctions needed to be maintained as leverage.
“I think giving full access to reserves would be catastrophic,”
Payenda said, accusing the Taliban of still having ties to Al-Qaida.
“The Taliban know that they cannot run a government without the
finances and technical assistance that comes from other countries.”
The White House this week made clear that it would not
prematurely let go of any economic leverage over the Taliban. Biden
administration officials insisted that such leverage would be important to
ensure that the Taliban stick to their commitments to let Americans, permanent
residents and Afghan citizens holding special immigrant visas to leave the
country.
“When we’re talking about Afghan reserves, Afghan access to the
banking system, Afghan access to any kind of fundamental operation of the
economy, think about the fact that the US has basically been the steward of
this for the last 20 years,” Jake Sullivan, the White House’s national security
adviser, told CNN.
Arguing that the Taliban now have a degree of dependence on the US,
he added, “They understand the extent to which their ability to deliver
anything for their citizens in the way of a functioning economy rests on the
international community. It rests on the US.”
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