Paralysed Banking System Pushing Afghanistan Towards Collapse

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Dubai (Reuters) – Afghanistan is getting closer to the economic collapse of six months after the Taliban seizes power, the Red Cross says on Friday, with a banking system that paralyzes international efforts to get financial assistance to a war-hit country.

Organizations such as the Red Cross have been forced to rely on informal money exchanges to move cash to pay salaries of several workers, even though most of the estimated 500,000 Afghan civil servants now work for months.

The banking system is really paralyzed. The central bank does not operate,” The International Committee for the Director of the Red Cross Robert Mardini told Reuters, added that he paid around 10,000 doctors and nurses using the informal ‘Hawala’ money transfer network.

Mardini said the call from the capital Kabul that the international community and the Taliban need to find a pragmatic solution to get the banking system and walk when Afghanistan was hung by threads.

You can’t just run the country in a hawala system. There needs to be political negotiations for this. But the hour was beating, “added Mardini.

Afghan’s new ruler has appealed to the international community to help the state and have pressed billions of dollars of frozen assets abroad to be released.

The Afghan economy relies on assistance before the West-supported government was overthrown last year by the hardline of the Taliban Islamist, which was under unilateral sanctions that had made foreign banks reluctant to facilitate the transfer of aid money.

The United States has tried to eliminate concerns about those who provide humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan because of the fall of sanctions and said it would free $ 3.5 billion in Afghan’s central bank assets on Afghan land to help Afghanistan.

Mardini said the Red Cross would immediately request $ 50 million from the donor for assistance to Afghanistan this year, above 150 million Swiss francs that had been budgeted ($ 161 million).