VIJAY PRASHADDe cómo los talibanes echaron a Occidente de Afganistán

por Vijay Prashad, NEWSClick, 26/8/2021
Traducido por S. Seguí, Tlaxcala

Algunos días después de que los talibanes entraran en Kabul, el 15 de agosto, sus representantes empezaron a hacer averiguaciones en busca de la “localización de activos” del banco central de la nación, el Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), unos activos conocidos que ascienden a cerca de 9.000 millones de dólares. En comparación, el banco central del vecino Uzbekistán, que tiene una población casi equivalente de aproximadamente 34 millones de personas para una población en Afganistán de más de 39 millones, tiene reservas internacionales por valor de 35.000 millones de dólares. Pero Afganistán es un país pobre, en comparación, y sus recursos han sido devastados por la guerra y la ocupación.

Reunión del Banco central el 29 de agosto, bajo la dirección del gobernador nombrado por los talibanes, mulá Abdul Qaher (Hayi Muhammad Idris)

Los funcionarios del DAB dijeron a los talibanes que los 9.000 millones de dólares están en la Reserva Federal de Nueva York, lo que significa que la riqueza de Afganistán está en un banco de Estados Unidos. Pero antes de que los talibanes pudieran intentar acceder al dinero, el Departamento del Tesoro de Estados Unidos ya se había adelantado y había congelado los activos del DAB y puesto la transferencia de éstos fuera del control de los talibanes.

El Fondo Monetario Internacional (FMI) asignó recientemente 650.000 millones de dólares en Derechos Especiales de Giro (DEG) para su distribución en todo el mundo. Cuando se les preguntó si Afganistán podría acceder a su parte de los DEG, un portavoz del FMI dijo en un correo electrónico: “Como siempre, el FMI se guiará por la opinión de la comunidad internacional. Actualmente, la comunidad internacional no tiene claro el reconocimiento de un gobierno en Afganistán, por lo que el país no puede acceder a los DEG ni a otros recursos del FMI”.

Los puentes financieros tendidos hacia Afganistán para sostener al país durante los 20 años de guerra y devastación, se han derrumbado lentamente. El FMI decidió retener la transferencia de 370 millones de dólares antes de que los talibanes entraran en Kabul, y ahora los bancos comerciales y Western Union han suspendido las transferencias de dinero al país. La moneda nacional, el afgani, está en caída libre.

PEPE ESCOBARBack to the future: Talibanistan, Year 2000

Pepe Escobar, The Saker, 31/8/2021

Dear reader: this is very special, a trip down memory lane like no other: back to prehistoric times – the pre-9/11, pre-YouTube, pre-social network world.

Welcome to Taliban Afghanistan – Talibanistan – in the Year 2000. This is when photographer Jason Florio (see his Afghan Diary) and myself slowly crossed it overland from east to west, from the Pakistani border at Torkham to the Iranian border at Islam qillah. As Afghan ONG workers acknowledged, we were the first Westerners to pull this off in years.

Fatima, Maliha and Nouria, at home in Kabul

Those were the days. Bill Clinton was enjoying his last stretch at the White House. Osama bin Laden was a discreet guest of Mullah Omar – hitting the front pages only occasionally. There was no hint of 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, the “war on terror”, the perpetual financial crisis, the Russia-China strategic partnership. Globalization ruled, and the US was the undisputed global top dog. The Clinton administration and the Taliban were deep into Pipelineistan territory – arguing over the tortuous, proposed Trans-Afghan gas pipeline.

We tried everything, but we couldn’t even get a glimpse of Mullah Omar. Osama bin Laden was also nowhere to be seen. But we did experience Talibanistan in action, in close detail.

Today is a special day to revisit it. The Forever War in Afghanistan is over; from now on it will be a Hybrid mongrel, against the integration of Afghanistan into the New Silk Roads and Greater Eurasia.

In 2000 I wrote a Talibanistan road trip special for a Japanese political magazine, now extinct, and ten years later a 3-part mini-series revisiting it for Asia Times.

Part 2 of this series can be found here, and part 3 here.

Yet this particular essay – part 1 – had completely disappeared from the internet (that’s a long story): I found it recently, by accident, in a hard drive. The images come from the footage I shot at the time with a Sony mini-DV: I just received the file today from Paris.

This is a glimpse of a long-lost world; call it a historical register from a time when no one would even dream of a “Saigon moment” remixed – as a rebranded umbrella of warriors conveniently labeled “Taliban”, after biding their time, Pashtun-style, for two decades, praises Allah for eventually handing them victory over yet another foreign invader.

Now let’s hit the road.

KABUL, GHAZNI – Fatima, Maliha and Nouria, who I used to call The Three Graces, must be by now 40, 39 and 35 years old, respectively. In the year 2000 they lived in an empty, bombed house next to a bullet-ridden mosque in a half-destroyed, apocalyptic theme park Kabul – by then the world capital of the discarded container (or reconstituted by a missile and reconverted into a shop); a city where 70% of the population were refugees, legions of homeless kids carried bags of cash on their backs ($1 was worth more than 60,000 Afghanis) and sheep outnumbered rattling 1960s Mercedes buses.

Under the merciless Taliban theocracy, the Three Graces suffered triple discrimination – as women, Hazaras and Shi’ites. They lived in Kardechar, a neighborhood totally destroyed in the 1990s by the war between Commander Masoud, The Lion of the Panjshir, and the Hazaras (the descendants of mixed marriages between Genghis Khan’s Mongol warriors and Turkish and Tajik peoples) before the Taliban took power in 1996. The Hazaras were always the weakest link in the Tajik-Uzbek-Hazara alliance – supported by Iran, Russia and China – confronting the Taliban.