New Delhi: From Pakistan foreign ministry to Jemima Goldsmith to US scholars and Pakistani citizens, all are on board against the Joe Biden administration’s decision to use Afghanistan assets to pay reparations to 9/11 victims. They have called it a “sovereign” issue to a “cross-border theft”, with Dawn saying the decision will not be taken “lying down” by either Pakistan or Afghanistan.
Both the Foreign Office and Prime Minister Imran khan criticised Biden’s decision to unfreeze $7 billion of Afghanistan central bank’s financial assets located in US banks. The assets will be split between humanitarian aid to the war-torn nation and the families of victims of the 9/11 attacks, Deutsche Welle reported.
Biden’s withholding of half of Afghan assets to keep within the US was widely criticised by the international media earlier this week, due to the beleaguered economy and food security crises that Afghanistan has been facing. And Pakistan has now weighed in on the issue as well.
Foreign Office spokesperson Asim Iftikhar Ahmad Saturday reiterated “Islamabad’s principled position” on Afghanistan’s sovereign ownership and the need to urgently release Afghan assets to revive the country’s economy, GEO TV reported.
“The utilisation of Afghan funds should be the sovereign decision of Afghanistan,” Iftikhar said.
Even some 9/11 victims families are against receiving money that belongs to the people of Afghanistan and no one else.
There are ways to help these 9/11 victims families without crushing the hopes of a country on the verge of economic collapse.
— Michael Kugelman (@MichaelKugelman) February 11, 2022
Prime Minister Imran khan Sunday said that providing assistance to the people of Afghanistan is the international community’s collective responsibility. He also said that Europe as well as Afghanistan’s neighbours have actively supported unfreezing of Afghan assets, Radio Pakistan reported.
Also read: Biden signs order to split $7bn from frozen Afghan bank assets between 9/11 victims & Kabul aid
‘Morally reprehensible’
As such, Pakistan’s leading newspaper Dawn labelled the fallout behind Biden’s executive order as a move that neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan would accept “lying down”. And that both supporters and critics of the Taliban regime view the decision as “unjust and unfair”.
Writer-producer and PM Khan’s former wife Jemima Goldsmith was among the more high-profile critics in a Pakistani context. Goldsmith called the executive order as “morally indefensible”, saying no Afghan was involved in 9/11.
This is morally indefensible when Afghan mothers are selling their organs to save their children from starvation. Not a single Afghan was involved in 9/11. The average Afghan wasn’t even alive when that atrocity happened. https://t.co/qkEFccA5KC
— Jemima Goldsmith (@Jemima_Khan) February 11, 2022
Barrister Asad Rahim Khan also hit out at the Biden administration, referring to the move as a “timeless” example of “cross-border theft”.
“To be clear, Joe Biden and his inner circle of aging Beltway sadists are going to steal half the money, from a country on the brink of starvation. They will then shower it on a cause that was so overfunded when 9/11 actually happened, the Red Cross asked people to donate to other emergencies. When it was flooded with cash even more, the Red Cross only took it “after attempting and failing to dissuade the donor from restricting his gift for that purpose only”,” Khan wrote in an op-ed for Dawn.
In light of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, both India and Pakistan have also been under the scanner this weekend.
Attempts to send wheat from India to Afghanistan via Pakistani soil have reportedly been caught in bureaucratic red tape with missed shipments before finally coming to an agreement with shipments slated to start on 22 February.