Daily Times

The Taliban will be denied access to any Afghan reserves held in US accounts, a US administration official told AFP on Monday.

As US forces were evacuating Afghanistan’s capital after the Taliban’s swift takeover, the official said, “Any Central Bank assets the Afghan government have in the United States will not be made available to the Taliban.”

The central bank’s gross reserves totaled $9.4 billion at the end of April, according to the International Monetary Fund. But most of those funds are held outside of Afghanistan, according to a person familiar with the issue.

It was not immediately clear what share is held in the United States. Meanwhile, United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken has stated that the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan is nothing like that of Vietnam, Al Jazeera has reported. Afghanistan has descended into political and social chaos after the Taliban took control of Kabul as US troops are leaving the country after two decades. Former Afghanistan president Ashraf Ghani stepped down from the position as well and fled from the Afghan capital in a military jet.

In 1975, a viral photo of the US’s defeat in Vietnam, showed evacuees boarding a helicopter. It is again making rounds on social media after the United States stated it would send around 3,000 US soldiers to help embassy staff leave Afghanistan. Blinken, in a series of interviews, backed President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw his forces from Afghanistan by the end of August.

“Remember, this is not Saigon,” CNN quoted from Blinken as saying as quoted by Al Jazeera. “We went to Afghanistan 20 years ago with one mission, and that mission was to deal with the folks who attacked us on 9/11 – and we have succeeded in that mission.” Blinken assured that the personnel were being shifted from the embassy in Kabul to the airport’s facility. “It’s why the president sent in a number of forces to make sure that, as we continue to draw down our diplomatic presence, we do it in a safe and orderly fashion and at the same time maintain a core diplomatic presence in Kabul,” Blinken told ABC News.

The Pentagon have deployed another 1,000 US troops to facilitate evacuations, an official, adding that the number of troops has reached 6,000. The standby soldiers are of the 82nd Airborne Division.

Republican leader Mitch McConnell pointed fingers at Biden for “a massive, predictable, and preventable disaster” taking place in Afghanistan. “President Biden’s decisions have us hurtling toward an even worse sequel to the humiliating fall of Saigon in 1975,” he said in a statement.

British and NATO forces will not return to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban, the United Kingdom’s defence secretary said, after the group took control of Kabul following a blistering nationwide offensive. Ben Wallace told Sky News on Monday that it was “not on the cards that we’re going to go back” as reports of bloodshed in the Afghan capital fuelled concerns of a looming humanitarian crisis.

“I acknowledge that the Taliban are in control of the country,” Wallace said. The group’s rapid takeover was a “failure of the international community”, Wallace later told the BBC, describing the 20-year-long intervention led by the United States as a job only half-done.

“All of us know that Afghanistan is not finished. It’s an unfinished problem for the world and the world needs to help it,” he said. He has previously accused former US President Donald Trump of having brokered a “rotten deal” with the Taliban that allowed their return against the backdrop of a hasty withdrawal of foreign forces.