In late March, the first all-women delegation from the U.S. to Afghanistan since the Taliban took control of the country last August took place. The delegation was sponsored by a coalition that included the peace group Code Pink and a new group called Unfreeze Afghanistan, which is seeking to release billions of dollars that belong to the Afghan government.
The group is calling for the release of these funds that have been frozen in U.S. banks, to enable the country to address its severe hunger crisis and pay public workers, including teachers, doctors and health care workers.
The trip was planned to coincide with the reopening of girls’ secondary schools in the country, but the group learned two days before departure that the Taliban had reversed their earlier decision and would not allow girls’ high schools to reopen. The women then decided it was even more important that they proceed with their trip. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink Women For Peace, and one of the trip’s organizers. Here, she talks about who the delegates met with on their trip and their work to unfreeze Afghan government funds.
MEDEA BENJAMIN: We had all kinds of meetings, Melinda. It was really fascinating. We met with members of the government, with a lot of different girls’ schools that are NGOs or private schools. Those are continuing to function. We met with groups that give out humanitarian assistance because the economic situation is so dire. And we met with all kinds of people running women’s shelters — people working with different women’s organizations that have continued under the Taliban. So we got quite a view of things.
We met with the ministry of education, and we met with the central bank. You bring up two issues: one is the Taliban government and the restrictions they’ve put on women and girls, and the other one is the bank. We came away very convinced that freezing the $7 billion that belongs to the central bank is actually harming women and girls and those two things should be separate. The money should be sent back to the central bank, and we should be dialoguing with the Taliban to push them to give women and girls the rights they deserve.
MELINDA TUHUS: What I don’t understand is why is this money in U.S. banks in the first place?
MEDEA BENJAMIN: That’s a good question. Typically, the Federal Reserve Bank was considered a safe place to park foreign assets, and that’s what the U.S. advised the government to do. Remember the U.S. occupied their country for 20 years, and said this would be safe in U.S. banks and suddenly the Taliban took over and the Biden administration said, “Uh oh, we’re not going to give you access to this money.”
No matter what government is in place, the bank has a function. It is the place where businesses will put their money, where individuals will put their money, where the currency gets stabilized because they have the liquidity. If you take away the cash a central bank has, people can’t get their money out. We met women pensioners who were crying and saying, “Why are you hurting us by not allowing me to get my pension?” We met women business owners who said, “I can’t pay the women who work for me.”
MELINDA TUHUS: You’ve been to Afghanistan before, right?
MEDEA BENJAMIN: Yes.
MELINDA TUHUS: Maybe several times. I’m curious if you saw anything in your most recent trip, with the Taliban fully in control, again, that was positive, especially how women and girls are being treated, but also just in general?
MEDEA BENJAMIN: It’s a question I never get asked, and there actually are some positive things. Security is better. You might have heard that there were some recent bomb blasts that happened after we left, with ISIS that is still in Afghanistan that is targeting the minority community called the Hazara. But in general, the situation is much more secure.
The other thing that’s positive is that there is less corruption. We were told by business people that they had to pay off so many levels of government that they figured they’d lose about 20 percent of their profits through corruption, and now they don’t have that.
MELINDA TUHUS: Do you think the fact that it has pretty much fallen completely off the radar of media outlets in the U.S., and I would say even among some of the more left or grassroots media outlets – is that hurting the chances for women’s lives to improve, or to put maybe pressure on the Taliban, that’s not happening now?
MEDEA BENJAMIN: It’s hurting all kinds of things. There should be much more pressure on the Biden administration to release the frozen funds. There should be much more pressure on the Biden administration and Congress to be more generous when it comes to humanitarian aid. You know the U.S. pulled the plug on the Afghan budget that was dependent after 20 years; 85 percent of its operating expenditures were coming from overseas, and that completely dried up.
The money that was used to pay teachers’ salaries and salaries of people working in the hospitals and just running the government, dried up. Then there is the humanitarian appeal because people are so starved, and it falls $2 billion short and the U.S. doesn’t make that up. It’s important to recognize, and even President Biden said this, that the U.S. had been spending $300 million a day for 20 years on the war in Afghanistan, and now won’t — he didn’t say this part, but I’m saying — won’t make up the shortfall with less than what was a week’s worth of spending, the $2 billion. So, when you don’t hear in the news how Afghans are struggling, how wrong it is what the U.S. government is doing, then it’s hard to build up pressure.
For more information, visit Code Pink Women for Peace at codepink.org and Unfreeze Afghanistan at unfreezeafghanistan.org.
