Hussein Malla/AP Photo
People wait to enter a bank in Kabul, Afghanistan, February 13, 2022.
Famine is tightening its grip on Afghanistan. As James Downie points out at The Washington Post, the country is facing the worst humanitarian disaster on the planet. United Nations agencies estimate that 95 percent of Afghans already don’t have enough food, and by this summer 97 percent will be in poverty. Refugees are pouring out of the country. Literally millions could die, especially young children.
The Biden administration triggered this famine by stealing from the Afghan people, while maintaining broad economic sanctions against the country. When the American occupation ended, the American state seized approximately $7 billion in currency reserves from the Afghan central bank (which were not America-provided funds, but accumulated through trade). This has caused all the problems one might expect. The banking system has ceased to function; businesses can’t find credit and have resorted to mass bankruptcies and layoffs; people can’t get enough cash; the country can’t afford necessary imports; and the value of the currency is collapsing.
After dithering for several months, the administration recently announced that it is taking $3.5 billion of the reserves and setting it aside for families of 9/11 victims, while sending another $3.5 billion to unspecified humanitarian relief efforts.
This makes it virtually impossible for the dire economic and humanitarian situation in Afghanistan to recover. But it’s actually worse than that: The main recipients of the looted reserves are likely to include a former administration insider and numerous well-connected lawyers and lobbyists.
Lee Fang and Ryan Grim report at The Intercept that Lee Wolosky of the law firm Jenner & Block LLP worked in the Biden White House on Afghanistan issues from September to January. He is now a lead attorney for a handful of 9/11 families attempting to get their mitts on the Afghan reserves. (The firm insists that Wolosky recused himself from any issues related to his legal work while in the administration.) Fang reports in another article that the firms Kreindler & Kreindler and Motley Rice are also scrambling for their place at the imperial feeding trough, with the help of several lobbyists with close connections to the Biden administration.
The collective payout to all the swarming lawyers and lobbyists could easily be over $500 million—quite literally in the form of bread snatched from the mouths of starving widows and orphans. By the same token, given past experience in Afghanistan, a big chunk of the $3.5 billion in humanitarian donations will undoubtedly vanish into the pockets of Western contractors and nonprofits, rather than reaching the people who need it.
The main recipients of the looted reserves are likely to include a former administration insider and numerous well-connected lawyers and lobbyists.
As Trevor Filseth explains at The National Interest, the primary cause of this famine is not agricultural, but economic. There is likely enough food in Afghanistan for all Afghans to survive, and in any case more could be imported as needed. The main problem is the shattering recession and currency crisis that has crushed the Afghan economy since American troops withdrew. Occupation spending accounted for about 40 percent of the country’s GDP, and three-quarters of its government budget. Most Afghans can’t afford food that would otherwise be readily available.
Virtually all famines in the modern era have been like this. As economist and philosopher Amartya Sen famously argued in his book Poverty and Famines, since at least the Industrial Revolution, famines have virtually never been caused by an absolute shortage of food, but instead by the price of food rising beyond the reach of the poor. During the Bengal famine of 1943, for instance, the local food supply was actually increasing, but economic shifts drove large segments of society out of work, and British colonial administrators refused to organize sufficient relief efforts. As a result, some two to three million died from starvation and disease.
It follows that humanitarian relief efforts, while important, are not the most effective step that could be taken to ameliorate the crisis in Afghanistan. The key thing is to unclog the financial system and breathe some life back into the economy. And the most effective way to do that would be to restore Afghanistan’s currency reserves. Instead, hundreds of millions of dollars are earmarked for attorney’s fees.
A likely objection to restoring the central bank reserves is that it would benefit the Taliban, who are liable to oppress the Afghan people and engage in corruption. On one level this is gobsmacking hypocrisy. America has no leg to stand on in terms of oppression, given the murderous warlord proxies we relied on during the occupation, and the multiple horrifying atrocities committed by U.S. troops. Similarly, the U.S. puppet state that preceded Taliban rule was one of the most corrupt governments in human history, and a large chunk of that corruption was carried out by American contractors and mercenaries, who funneled occupation money into their own pockets by the tens of billions.
This makes the self-serving arguments from thieving lawyers truly maddening. “The reality is, the Afghan people did not stand up to the Taliban … They bear some responsibility for the condition they’re in,” Kreindler & Kreindler partner Andrew Maloney told the BBC (as Fang notes). In reality, the reason the Taliban rule today is because the American puppet state—which the U.S. spent some $2.3 trillion trying to prop up—was so unpopular, incompetent, and corrupt that it collapsed the very instant it faced a mild challenge. (And I would like to see some doughy middle-aged American attorneys take up arms or even speak out against Taliban troops.)
Complaints from the administration that the money is tied up in litigation are also unconvincing. The White House chose to siphon off $3.5 billion by itself; it could have picked a smaller number for 9/11 families, or simply declined to seize it in the first place. It even probably could have talked any of about a dozen U.S. allies into restoring the funds to the Afghan central bank as a favor. The European Union in particular is not keen on another refugee crisis. Seven billion dollars, by way of comparison, is about half a week’s worth of the American military budget.
On another level, it is frankly true that handing the reserves over would help the Taliban. Doing anything to help the Afghan people will shore up Taliban rule, because they currently rule the country, and will therefore get some credit for any improvement in conditions.
Sometimes political leadership requires facing unpleasant facts. There are two options facing the Biden administration: either remove its hands from the throat of the Afghan economy, and admit that there’s no better option than letting the Taliban do as best they can (as America tolerates in so many other repressive regimes); or continue the throttling until thousands or very possibly millions die, greatly strengthening the position of the Taliban’s likeliest successors, namely, ISIS.
The fact that this is being done in part so a bunch of lawyers in Northern Virginia can add another zero to their bank accounts shows how pointless an exercise it all is. Unless Biden reverses course, ends the sanctions, and finds some way to restore the functioning of the Afghan central bank, he could easily end up killing an order of magnitude more Afghans than died in 20 years of war, for no reason other than political cowardice and grubby corruption.
