US theft of Afghan assets amounts to silent massacre | News
US President Joe Biden’s decision to divert billions of dollars in frozen Afghan assets to the families of 9/11 victims puts salt in the wounds of millions of suffering Afghans.
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Presenting the theft as “aid” in a self-righteous statement, the White House said the loot was “to be used for the benefit of the Afghan people”, and that the United States was “committed to supporting the Afghan people” and continued to “consider all options available to us to achieve this goal.”
And even though the Afghan people have nothing to do with the attacks of September 11, 2001, Washington has decided to withhold half of the approximately $7 billion in assets of the Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB) for alleged compensation of American casualties.
After the withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, the United States froze more than $9 billion in ATM assets. The move is widely seen as the main factor leading to the current economic crisis and humanitarian disaster in the war-torn Asian country of some 39 million people. Mohammad Naeem, spokesman for the Taliban’s political office in Qatar, tweeted that “the theft of blocked funds from the nation of Afghanistan by the United States and its seizure is indicative of the lowest level of human and moral decay in a country. and a nation”.
The world’s richest superpower is stealing from the pockets of a poor country, repeating a history of theft that has flouted legal, moral and humanistic principles. During the 20-year military campaign, more than 30,000 civilians in Afghanistan were killed by US forces or died as a result of US-led warfare, and some 11 million people were displaced .
The day before the evacuation from Afghanistan, a US drone strike on a house in Kabul in August 2021 killed 10 civilians, including seven children. The Afghan people, who have been devastated and separated from their loved ones and family, cannot hold the US military responsible, let alone receive compensation.
As Afghan political analyst Nazari Pariani has noted, in the so-called US-led “war on terror”, not only have a colossal number of Afghan civilians been killed, but the number of terrorist organizations Afghan troops rose from single digits to over 20 during the US military presence. Instead of rooting out terrorism, the United States has fueled it.
An August 2021 report by the United States Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction stated that the United States had invested US$145 billion in the reconstruction of Afghanistan. But after 20 years, Afghanistan is left with a depleted economy, crumbling infrastructure, backward industry and deepening crisis.
Before the troop withdrawal in 2021, statistics showed that 72% of the Afghan population lived below the poverty line, unemployment was 38% and 3.5 million children were out of school.
The reason the United States has had so little success in rebuilding Afghanistan is simple: the funds deployed have not been used to improve the livelihoods of the Afghan people. About 12% of US reconstruction aid to Afghanistan between 2002 and 2021 had gone to the Afghan government, with most of the rest going into the pockets of US companies.
Afghanistan faces “an avalanche of hunger and poverty”. The latest statistics from the United Nations World Food Program show that 22.8 million Afghans face acute food insecurity and many families cannot survive.
Whether it’s causing casualties, inflicting trauma, stoking terrorism and plundering the country’s assets, Washington seems utterly oblivious to the suffering of the Afghan people, taking a “moral height” and plundering a once again the Afghan people hungry for vital money without any tint. of guilt. It’s the latest episode in another season of American devastation in Afghanistan, a tragedy that is truly a silent slaughter.
