More than 70 economists and other academic experts sent a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Wednesday urging them to allow Afghanistan’s central bank to access the foreign exchange reserves frozen by Washington and to persuade other governments to lift the “coercive economic restrictions” that are exacerbating the suffering of the Afghan people.
Just a few months after the U.S. military withdrew from Afghanistan last August and the Taliban regained power following two decades of war that killed hundreds of thousands of people and cost trillions of dollars, Biden commandeered $7 billion worth of DAB assets held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, putting millions of people in the poverty-stricken country on the verge of starvation.
— source commondreams.org | Aug 10, 2022