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Afghan central bank board member asks Biden, IMF to release funds
A senior board member of Afghanistan’s central bank is urging the US Treasury and the International Monetary Fund to take steps to provide the Taliban-led government limited access to the country’s reserves to avoid economic disaster.
The Taliban took over Afghanistan with astonishing speed, but it appears unlikely that they will get quick access to most of the roughly $10 billion in assets held by Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), which are mostly outside of the country, Reuters reported.
US President Joe Biden’s administration has said any central bank assets the Afghan government have in the United States will not be made available to the Taliban, and the IMF has said the country will not have access to the lender’s resources.
Shah Mehrabi, an economics professor at Montgomery College in Maryland and a member of the bank’s board since 2002, told Reuters in a telephone interview on Wednesday that Afghanistan faces an “inevitable economic and humanitarian crisis” if its international reserves remain frozen.
Mehrabi stressed he does not speak for the Taliban but is making this push in his capacity as a sitting board member. He said he plans to meet with US lawmakers this week, and hopes to talk to US Treasury officials soon as well.
“If the international community wants to prevent an economic collapse, one way would be to allow Afghanistan to gain limited and monitored access to its reserves,” he told Reuters.
“Having no access will choke off the Afghan economy, and directly hurt the Afghan people, with families pushed further into poverty.”
Mehrabi is proposing that Washington allow the new government in Kabul a limited amount of access each month, perhaps in the range of $100m to $125m to start with, that would be monitored by an independent auditor.
“The Biden administration should negotiate with the Taliban over the money in the same way they negotiated over the evacuation,” he said.
If the assets remain entirely frozen, then inflation will continue to soar, Afghans will not be able to afford basic necessities, and the central bank will lose its main tools for conducting monetary policy, he said.
The Taliban can survive on customs duties, increasing opium production, or selling off captured American military gear, but everyday Afghans will suffer and be solely reliant on international aid if the country does not have access to currency, Mehrabi added.
After nearly 20 years of American intervention, the Afghan economy is heavily dollarised, and depends on imports that largely must be purchased with foreign currency, he said.
With overseas reserves off-limits, Da Afghanistan Bank may be undermined after having cultivated a non-political, technocratic institution that so far has been allowed to continue its work under the Taliban, Mehrabi said.
“Their work there is not based on who is in power,” he said, noting that he has not been personally in touch with Taliban representatives, but is in daily contact with colleagues running operations there now.
Ajmal Ahmady, who led the central bank until the capture of Kabul, has said about $7 billion of DAB’s assets was held as a mixture of cash, gold, bonds and other investments at the US Federal Reserve.
Most of the rest is in other international accounts and at the Bank for International Settlements, a bank for central banks based in Switzerland, and not physically in DAB vaults, he said – leaving about 0.2 percent or less of the total accessible to the Taliban.
The Embassy of Japan in Afghanistan announced on Friday that the country has allocated $19.5 million in humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan.
In a statement, the Japanese Embassy said it hopes the aid will help bring positive change to the lives of vulnerable Afghans.
According to the statement, the assistance will cover the basic humanitarian needs of vulnerable communities in Afghanistan.
The embassy added that the aid will be delivered through United Nations agencies, international organizations, and Japanese non-governmental organizations operating in Afghanistan.
Japan’s total assistance to Afghanistan since August 2021 has reached more than $549 million.
Security forces at the Islam Qala border in Herat province prevented hundreds of young Afghans from illegally entering Iran.
Officials from the 207 Al-Farooq Army Corps said that around 530 people attempted over the past two days to illegally enter Iranian territory through areas of Kohsan district in Herat, but border forces detained them and transferred them back to their original areas.
Meanwhile, some sources said that a group of 70 people who were heading to Iran on Wednesday through areas of Kohsan district became stranded amid cold weather and snowfall, resulting in the deaths of two of them.
President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program on Thursday that allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to come to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that, at Trump’s direction, she is ordering the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program, the Associated Press reported.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.
Neves Valente, 48, is suspected in the shootings at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, and the killing of an MIT professor. He was found dead Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials said.
Neves Valente had studied at Brown on a student visa beginning in 2000, according to an affidavit from a Providence police detective. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and months later obtained legal permanent residence status, according to the affidavit. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017.
The diversity visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are little represented in the U.S., many of them in Africa. The lottery was created by Congress, and the move is almost certain to invite legal challenges.
Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected when including spouses with the winners. After winning, they must undergo vetting to win admission to the United States. Portuguese citizens won only 38 slots.
Lottery winners are invited to apply for a green card. They are interviewed at consulates and subject to the same requirements and vetting as other green-card applicants.
Trump has long opposed the diversity visa lottery. Noem’s announcement is the latest example of using tragedy to advance immigration policy goals. After an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a fatal attack on National Guard members in November, Trump’s administration imposed sweeping rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other counties.
While pursuing mass deportation, Trump has sought to limit or eliminate avenues to legal immigration. He has not been deterred if they are enshrined in law, like the diversity visa lottery, or the Constitution, as with a right to citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear his challenge to birthright citizenship.
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