The Taliban are asking for financial help because of the deadly earthquake that hit Zora. The US demands guarantees that the money will be used for humanitarian purposes
The US and the Taliban, in power in Afghanistan, will discuss today in Doha the creation of a mechanism that will allow the release of funds, after the extremely deadly earthquake that hit the country, with Washington seeking guarantees that they would be used for humanitarian purposes.
The White House said it was working “urgently” on the dossier. However, a member of the Afghan central bank estimates that it will take time to conclude an agreement.
The Taliban regime’s foreign minister, Amir Khan Mutaki, arrived in the Qatari capital on Wednesday along with officials from the finance ministry and the central bank, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hafiz Zia Ahmed said via Twitter.
They will hold talks with the US government’s special envoy for Afghanistan, Tom West, the State Department confirmed yesterday. Washington intends to raise a number of issuesmainly related to human rights and girls’ education, according to the same source.
“None of these commitments should be seen as ‘legitimizing’ the Taliban or their so-called government, but as a mere reflection of a reality: we should have such discussions to support US interests,” a US diplomat said.
Since the Taliban came to power on August 15, 2021, Washington has seized seven billion dollars, part of the Afghan central bank’s reserves deposited in the United States.
The American president Joe Biden intended to allocate half of this amount to compensate the families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks in the United States and the other half to provide humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, but in a way that would guarantee that the money would not fall into their hands of the new fundamentalist regime.
“We are working hard to resolve these difficult issues with the use of these funds, to ensure that they benefit the Afghan people and not the Taliban,” White House spokeswoman Karin Jean-Pierre said last week.
“Restricted and controlled” release?
A member of the governing body of the Central Bank of Afghanistan confirmed to the French Agency on Wednesday that negotiations are underway, but warned that it will take time to reach an agreement.
“The details of the central bank’s stock transfer mechanism have not yet been finalized,” said Sa Mehrabi, who is also a professor of economics at Montgomery College (Maryland, Eastern USA).
“It will take time, these are not done overnight,” he added.
According to Mehrabi, $ 3.5 billion is expected to be transferred to the Afghan central bank. For his part, he suggested a “limited and controlled release” of stocks, for example “allocating 150 million a month to pay for imports”.
That would support the Afghan currency, stabilize prices and allow Afghans to get basic goods such as bread, oil, sugar and fuel, he explained.
The utilization of funds “can be controlled and subject to auditing by specialized companies with the possibility of termination in case of abusive expenses”, added the economist Mr. Mehrabi.
According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 24 million Afghans, more than half the country’s population, are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance.
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