What happens in Kabul with the reopening of the banks
Ten days after the Taliban entered Kabul, the banks are reopening. Long queues immediately formed: everyone wants to withdraw cash. The details in an in-depth study by Al Jazeera
In Kabul, Afghanistan, banks are starting to open again. They had in fact decided to close, almost all of them, on the afternoon of April 15, just before the Taliban entered the capital and President Ashraf Ghani fled the country.
Their reopening, Al Jazeera says, attracted crowds of hundreds of people looking for cash.
THE REASONS FOR THE CLOSURE
Kabul banks initially closed because they feared that the entry of the Taliban would cause massacres and looting. Then they waited to reopen because the United States decided to block the financial reserves that the Afghan central bank has in the Federal Reserve (about 7 billion dollars) to prevent the Taliban from accessing them. This week the International Monetary Fund also froze its loans to the country ($ 460 million), and so did the World Bank.
A few days earlier, tens of thousands of people had gone to banks and ATMs all over Kabul to withdraw as much money as possible before the Taliban arrived.
THE IMPORTANCE OF CASH
Virtually all purchases in Afghanistan are made in cash, and no one wants to run out of physical money – perhaps for weeks or months – at a time like this.
Al Jazeera reports the testimony of Massoud, who is 35 years old and has spent the last ten days in Kabul looking for ways to provide for his family, which is located in the northern province of Kunduz. Massoud is a former soldier in the Afghan army; it has 20,000 Afghanis (the national currency: the equivalent of 232 dollars) deposited in the bank but has difficulty accessing them, even now that the branches have reopened. There are long queues of people (someone tells Al Jazeera that "the banks are the new airports"); tension and anger are at a high level.
Other members of the security forces like Massoud are also wondering if they will still receive their salaries, now that the Taliban have taken control of the country: one thing is to ration the money for ten days, difficult but possible; another is to survive for months without a source of income.
People lined up in front of the banks told Al Jazeera that they are making do by asking small loans from acquaintances or colleagues: but it is an unsustainable practice for long, especially if the offices continue to remain closed and the shops have few customers.
WHAT THE TALEBANS DO
The Taliban have been slow to reopen government offices and have yet to announce a precise administrative structure. Last week the group said the finance ministry would guarantee salaries to all Afghan civil servants, but skepticism is rife: even public officials fear they will be out of work.
THE PERSPECTIVES
The decisions of the Federal Reserve, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund will probably send Afghanistan's finances into crisis: international financing makes it possible to finance about 80 per cent of the state budget and – according to the World Bank – in 2020 the flows of foreign aid accounted for roughly 43 percent of the country's economy.
On Monday, the Taliban appointed a new governor of the Afghan Central Bank : his name is Haji Mohammad Idris and little is known about him, as well as having dealt with financial matters for the organization for a long time and who did not receive specialized education.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/afghanistan-riapertura-banche-kabul/ on Thu, 26 Aug 2021 07:44:22 +0000.