While the Western foreign policy establishment is busy working out which part of World War II to compare the Russia-Ukraine thing to — are we at the Rhineland or “peace in our time” yet? — the US is running a truly monstrous operation in its former insurgent colony, Afghanistan.
Following the US declaring its own defeat and pulling out hours ahead of a total Taliban victory, Afghanistan’s US$9 billion in overseas holdings were frozen across the world. Seven billion is in US hands, and they are giving none of it back even though the Taliban has renounced its support of terrorism and has a country to run.
Instead, US$3.5 billion is being distributed to NGOs and other bodies for Afghan social support. That isn’t much use, since the freezing of the country’s money has destroyed the liquidity of its economy. There is no money for anything, which includes paying anyone. Unemployment is spiralling upwards; hunger, starvation and desperation are advancing.
The obvious realpolitik of this move is to put the blame on the Taliban as the proximate cause — an approach that seems to assume that because a country is poor, it doesn’t have satellite TV and can’t get CNN. The Taliban will make it very clear to the Afghan people just who is starving them of the means of life.
But it’s what the US is doing with the other half of the money that has provoked condemnation around the world, because the other US$3.5 billion is being put in escrow, pending the outcome of civil trials by families of 9/11 victims, who are still suing various global entities — including the Taliban government of 2001 — for unlawful killing of their relatives.
This capacity to sue any entity, anywhere, is the US at its battiest, but it has always been viable, given the immense reach of the US banking system. Its effect is usually to limit the action of overseas actors, but in this case, families involved in a group action may get a very substantial payday.
Nevertheless, it seems a move of extraordinary bastardry against the people of Afghanistan, and is not characteristic of the Biden administration. Indeed, it seems the sort of thing Trump would do, or talk about doing — Trump’s saving grace on the world stage was that his administration lacked the basic efficiency to do all the “take their oil”, “make Mexico pay” stuff Trump would fulminate about at rallies. Why make such an arsehole move?
The answer is that the Biden administration needs to get the 9/11 families off its back, and on two matters. The first was getting some money from the bad guys that could back up any court victory the 9/11 families might have, so that it would not be an empty victory — as cases against Iran and others have been.
But the Biden administration is under pressure — as have been previous administrations — over demands to release the full records from 9/11, including those that would show the complicity of outer branches of the Saudi royal family in support of al-Qaeda prior to and after 9/11.
That would be a nightmare for the US, whose alliance with the Saudis has only become closer over recent years, and which it now relies upon to contest Iranian influence in the Middle East — principally through support of the Saudis’ destructive war against Shiite, Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.
But it is also a domestic political problem, since the 9/11 families are well organised, especially around the documents-release issue. The administration was told by Brett Eagleson, the de facto leader of the 9/11 families (he was 15 when his father was killed in the Twin Towers and he brings a Wolverines-style relentlessness to the cause), that Biden wasn’t welcome at 20th-anniversary family commemorations of 9/11 last year, due to the continued refusal to release key documents.
The suspicion is, however, that the 9/11 families cause has a lot of Republican oomph behind it, as they were not nearly this insistent on Trump. Their insistence would certainly give Biden a political problem, especially if all the money had gone back to Afghanistan — akin to the charge against Barack Obama after the Iran nuclear deal that he was “giving money” away (unfreezing funds) — and so they have done the opposite: thrown a pot of money into the middle of their enemies.
Putting the US$3.5 billion into escrow for a court case was only one way to create forced reparations, and not the one that the 9/11 families leadership wanted. The court cases only involve some of the families; Eagleson and others wanted the funds generally distributed by executive order to registered victim families, as could have been easily done.
Instead, the promise of a biiiiiig payday will split the 9/11 families down the middle, distract from any document release and make them look far less noble. Eagleson, who has pursued the document issue for years to get some truth about the role of the gangster-family state of Saudi Arabia in mass murder, had to release a statement that began by saying that it welcomed the US$3.5 billion going directly to Afghan society, but that it also welcomed reparations for US families, about time, etc etc. Which made him and the organisation look like American jerks of the first order.
That the US would be willing to run interference for the Saudis again and again and again is hardly surprising. With Lebanon now a failed state (really a non-state), Syria still up for grabs and Iraq a Shiite-dominated republic, the overall result of 20 years’ of neoconservatism has been to entrench Iran as the dominant power in the Gulf.
Saudi Arabia has abrogated to itself the right to reach into Yemen, support breakaway separatist groups and claim to be restoring an order that always should have existed. The US, meanwhile, is backing it to the hilt, and, oh, where else in the world is something like that going on…?
This is all going on as Afghanistan starves and dies, as it did after the Soviets left, and after the first Taliban was removed, and the cycle begins all over again…
