Enlarge image
Big crowds on banks in Kabul on Sunday
Photo:
Rahmat Gul / AP
The Taliban have taken the Afghan capital Kabul in a flick and are posing with all sorts of captured military equipment.
But that doesn't mean that they also have access to the country's billion dollar foreign exchange reserves, as the refugee Afghan central bank chief Ajmal Ahmady says.
The central bank controls about nine billion dollars, wrote Ahmady, who is abroad, on Twitter.
Of this, seven billion dollars in the form of cash, gold, bonds and other investments would be with the US Federal Reserve.
Most of the remaining amount is also not lying around in Afghan vaults, but is in other international accounts - for example with the Switzerland-based Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which is the central bank of the central banks.
Only a maximum of 0.2 percent of the reserves are accessible to the Taliban.
Possible inflation at the expense of the poor
Since Afghanistan imports far more than it exports, and thus has a large current account deficit, the central bank "relied on receiving physical deliveries of cash every few weeks," Ahmady said.
"The amount of the remaining cash is almost zero, since the deliveries were stopped after the security situation worsened." The international reserves are not endangered.
“No money was stolen from a reserve account,” added Ahmady.
The stock of US dollars in the form of cash in Afghanistan, however, is close to zero, since the country did not receive a planned cash delivery during the Taliban offensive last week.
The next delivery never arrived, he wrote.
He suspects that the international partners would have suspected this.
Lack of dollars
Ahmady suggested that the dollar shortage is likely to lead to a devaluation of the Afghani currency and an increase in inflation - which could harm the poor in the country if, for example, food prices rise. The reason for this is that the central bank cannot provide the domestic banks with enough dollars, and he also assumes that the Taliban use capital controls to prevent outflows abroad. In turn, access to these reserves is likely to be made more difficult by the fact that the US government has classified the Taliban as a terrorist group. "The Taliban won militarily - but now they must rule," he wrote. "That is not easy."
A US government representative told Reuters that the Taliban would not be provided with any US-based Afghan government assets.
The Taliban, who now control Kabul, have designated the state treasury as well as public institutions and government offices as the property of the nation.
Ahmady said he was told that the Taliban had questioned bank employees about the whereabouts of assets.
apr / mrc / Reuters / AP