【Executive Summary】
Hello everyone, welcome to this issue of "Yiyu Dao Broken".
On February 11, 2022, an infuriating thing happened. The President of the United States has used presidential executive orders to attempt to loot Afghanistan's core assets. In this episode, we will talk about this matter:
The first part describes the target of the looting, how much money the central bank of Afghanistan has, in what form the money exists, and what its meaning and role are.
According to a Reuters report on August 18, 2021, the money owned by the Afghan central bank is roughly valued at between $9.5 billion and $10 billion. Now being targeted is $7 billion of that.
Some people may be accustomed to some of the larger numbers and are a little dismissive of the numbers. But in fact, according to a World Bank assessment of Afghanistan in 2021, its central bank has assets that roughly cover the money needed for Afghanistan to import for 15 months. According to the World Bank's assessment standards, if a country's central bank has foreign exchange reserves, or assets at its disposal, can cover imports for 3 months, it meets the minimum security standards.
We know one thing from this: this money is, to some extent, Afghanistan's life-saving money. If that money doesn't reach the Taliban, or if it's controlled by a force that has choked the main arteries of Afghanistan to some extent.
In the second part, let's talk about how the US assets freeze.
Back on August 18, 2021, the day Kabul recreated the "Saigon Moment," Bloomberg quoted anonymous U.S. government officials as announcing that the U.S. side had frozen 9.5 billion assets of the Afghan central bank in the United States, including those at the Federal Reserve, as well as assets in other financial institutions in the United States. This time, president Biden signed the executive order, why did it make a big fuss in the media communication, because everyone thinks it is very strange, how do you freeze twice?
If we look at Biden's executive order, we see that he invoked the rights granted to him as president by the U.S. Constitution and laws to realize this situation:
The humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, and the possibility that it could even collapse further, poses an unusual threat to U.S. national security and foreign policy. Protecting certain assets held by U.S. financial institutions in the U.S. at the Central Bank of Afghanistan is critical to addressing this emergency and the well-being of the Afghan people.
He was also aware that representatives of the victims of terrorism had made statutory claims on the property, so he decided to freeze the assets. As of the date of the Executive Order, the assets and property interests of the Central Bank of Afghanistan held by any U.S. financial institution, including the Federal Reserve, in the United States are frozen and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise disposed of, unless otherwise required. The "other rules" here are subtle, and the subtext is: frozen but can be used for backup.
Guys, this is a clear robbery based on a very bad set of logic. On February 11, the White House also sent a Fact Sheet to explain why the Biden administration did this, to prove that the situation in Afghanistan is terrible. Think about who caused this, the Afghan people? What role does the United States play in the middle?
A robber rushed into someone else's house, beat up the owner, supported a puppet, and then snatched the safe of someone else's house, saying in a beautiful name: "My family opens a bank, more reliable, let my house go!" And now he said, you see that the place is broken and rotten, so this safe cannot be returned to you, I will help you use it better!
A girl sits next to aid supplies in Khost Province, Afghanistan, on November 9, 2021. Xinhua News Agency
Let's talk about the third part, what are the specific difficulties in this matter? What does it mean for the United States?
On February 11, the White House website was very lively, and at 9 a.m. Eastern Time, they opened a Background Press Call, and two officials went to talk to reporters about it.
Let me read you a passage:
I want to say to be very clear that this is what we are talking about today is a process step and a step in a process that might lead to the unlocking of these funds for the benefits of Afghan people.
That is: we are in the process of taking a step that will eventually lead to the thawing of funds, which is for the benefit of the Afghan people.
然后没多久，他说Just to emphasize again，this is step for what in a process.
Why repeat this? Because he must avoid the impression that the US government can actually dispose of this money at will through the Fed. Why? Because this would destroy the credibility of the U.S. financial system, knowledgeable people will be very sensitive in this regard and will express it very carefully and carefully.
He went on to say that we would use the next few months to set up a trust fund through the Court and manage the asset through this third-party trust fund to ensure that the money would benefit the Afghan people.
Through clever expression and a series of technical maneuvers, the robbery seems to have been legitimized. In the discussion, the speaker also touched on the issue of the need for claims by the victims of 9/11. The reporter asked him directly: "Why do you want the Afghan people to pay the price?" Then he said directly, "You know, as I said just now, we have a well-known independent judiciary. Meaning, you go to the court for this, don't come to me.
This is a new step in the history of American plunder, and it may become a big step. Why? Because one of the core rules of the game in the U.S. financial system is whether the government's credibility and reputation continue to be reliable. If you're a country in the United States that can arbitrarily strip other countries of their central banks of their holdings, you don't deserve the world's trust.
But the United States is really poor now, using all kinds of blatant capital to flow to the United States, and even at the expense of robbing countries like Afghanistan of life-saving money. For the sake of a very distorted and selfish calculation, the United States has gone insane to destroy and shake the foundations of the international order it dominates and has built.
Maybe today's United States can still make very cool technology, maybe today's United States can still launch a local war thousands of kilometers away, but such a country is not worthy of being called the leader of the international system in any sense, no longer the founder and defender of the international order.
On the Afghan issue, it is clear that the United States will not only jam the Afghan central bank of this part of the money, but will never allow Afghanistan to use the international special drawing power. It wants to strangle the Taliban regime economically, and for that it may even risk turning all of Afghanistan into a training ground for terrorism. Didn't I master 3.5 billion, I threw it out, put people back in, put supplies back in... Incidentally, you can also do some negative spillover in the surrounding area. Previously, this imagination may have been just a script of the novel, but now that the elite establishment in the United States has once again refreshed the bottom line, we cannot say that this is just an imagination.
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