"The last poor plunder from a bleeding land"

 In the year-plus that Biden has been in power, there have been a number of key decisions he has made that could be described as disappointing, even devastating, policy betrayals... his decision to maintain Trump's anti-asylum Title 42 policy, for instance, or his failure to evacuate Afghan interpreters and other allies ahead of the military withdrawal from the country. Yet, his executive order unveiled yesterday seizing $7 billion in assets rightfully belonging to the people of Afghanistan—in the midst of an economic crisis—might be the most wicked and disgraceful thing yet. 

The enormity of this crime almost defies words; and one finds oneself even more at a loss to describe it because the substance of the policy has been occluded behind such mystifying rhetoric. What the order actually does is to forcibly expropriate the bulk of the reserves of Afghanistan's central bank, and place these assets under the control of the United States—all while Afghanistan's economy is collapsing and the country faces a hunger crisis. But what it claims to be doing, according to the administration's press release, is to "preserve certain Afghanistan Central Bank assets for the people of Afghanistan." 

How can they lie so brazenly? Well, it is true that the administration is putting half the confiscated assets in a trust fund to be administered by the UN for humanitarian purposes. But if the history of Western aid in Afghanistan is any guide, much of it will be skimmed off in the form of overhead to contractors before it ever reaches the target population. But more fundamentally still: this was never the U.S. government's money to spend, whether on humanitarian aid or otherwise. It belongs to the Afghan government and is now simply being seized wholesale, with half of it being designated for U.S. citizens. 

Where exactly did this money come from? About half a billion of it derives from the personal savings of ordinary Afghan citizens, due to a law in Afghanistan requiring commercial banks to deposit a portion of their assets with the country's central bank. The entire $7 billion that the U.S. is seizing makes up nearly 80% of the Afghan Central Bank's total reserves. After the Afghan government collapsed and the Taliban seized power, this money was transferred to the United States, where it was frozen in accordance with the U.S.'s sanctions regime against the Taliban. 

Was freezing these assets the right policy decision? Certainly not. The central bank is still independent of the Taliban, and a number of experts proposed ways to gradually unblock the assets without placing them in the hands of Afghanistan's new rulers. But even if returning this money to the Afghan people required working with the Taliban in some form, that is surely better than starving the whole country to death. The asset freeze is, after all, the primary reason why the Afghan economy has been in free-fall since this summer, why the Afghan currency collapsed, and why so many Afghans are now at risk of starvation. 

Besides, the U.S. chose to leave Afghanistan this summer knowing that the Afghan government could not defend itself, and that a Taliban seizure of power was the only likely result. What was their plan? To step away and watch this happen, then starve the country's inhabitants in some kind of misguided collective punishment? Well no, apparently the plan was even worse than that: it was to loot the country's last assets on the way out the door, seizing them for U.S. citizens, and dooming the last prop of the country's economy, rendering the entire nation of millions abjectly dependent on humanitarian aid for the foreseeable future. 

To understand how bad this is as policy, we can look to the history of similar sanctions regimes that tried to impose grave economic penalties on ordinary people in order to compel changes in government behavior. Iraq, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran... Can we point to a single instance in which these kinds of broad-based economy-wide sanctions either forced an authoritarian regime from power or caused them to moderate their behavior? No. All that resulted, in every case, was the massive and totally preventable suffering of the countries' ordinary inhabitants, which in turn fueled the ruling regimes' core narrative that it was the United States, not themselves, that was responsible for all the countries' woes. 

But what we're seeing as of yesterday's decision is something even more dishonorable than simply a punitive sanctions regime. It is the actual theft of resources properly belonging to a foreign government. To find parallels to that, we need to look even further back into the history of disgraceful colonial abuses... the kind of imperial looting and pillaging of subject peoples that Marx characterized as the "primitive accumulation" stage of capitalist exploitation. 

Taking away $7 billion that rightly belongs to Afghans and choosing to spend it as we see fit—including by earmarking half of it for our own citizens—simply because the U.S. can do so and is the dominant military power, is something more worthy of King Leopold than the kind of rights-respecting "rules-based" liberal power that the Biden administration claims to want to be. 

In pondering historical parallels, I was reminded of the passage in Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," in which he denounces the British for effectively pilfering the Elgin Marbles from subjugated Greece. What aroused the poet’s indignation was not only that the expropriation of these ancient artifacts amounted to theft, but that they were stolen, moreover, from a people who had already been stripped of their liberty and rights; that it was, so to speak, a quintessential case of kicking someone while they were down. I went back to find the passage and was particularly struck by one line—that in which Byron deems the marbles to be: The last poor plunder from a bleeding land.

If that were a fit description of a few archaeological relics from captive Greece, how much more is it true of the central bank reserves of starving Afghanistan—the vast majority of the bank's assets, the money that it needs if it is ever again to perform the core macroeconomic functions of any central bank: stabilizing the currency, easing inflation, etc. If any country on earth right now is "bleeding," it is Afghanistan. If anyone is guilty of plundering it while it is at its most helpless, it is the United States. If there is anything in the world worthy right now of a poet's wrath it is this: the shameful thieving of the last economic prop left to a country that is already in a state of collapse.