WASHINGTON: Nine senior US lawmakers sent a letter to secretaries of state and treasury on Saturday, asking them to help rebuild Afghanistan’s failing economy and to unfreeze the country’s assets.

The appeal coincides with an OIC foreign ministers’ conference in Islamabad on Sunday to consider options for helping Afghanistan and to urge the Taliban to soften their policies. The United States and other Western nations have refused to deal with the Taliban government until it changes its policies.

The US is also attending the meeting and has sent its special envoy for Afghanistan, Thomas West, to Islamabad. In a tweet posted on Saturday, Ambassador West noted that this “extraordinary session” of the OIC foreign ministers “focused on” the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan and described Pakistan’s decision to call the meeting as an “important initiative”.

This is an “approach the US can take to help prevent a catastrophic collapse of Afghanistan’s aid-dependent economy while not providing legitimacy to the Taliban,” the nine lawmakers wrote.

The letter is addressed to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and the signatories include the heads of three powerful House committees.

The lawmakers reminded the administration that they had the “responsibility to help the many million more who will stay to survive the winter, to feed their children, and to preserve what can be salvaged from the progress made during the last 20 years”.

Referring to a recent World Food Programme (WFP) report, the lawmakers pointed out that Afghanistan “is on the brink of economic collapse” as more than 18.4 million Afghans needed humanitarian assistance while 30 per cent of the population faced emergency or crisis-level food insecurity.

The letter includes four proposals: Releasing frozen Afghan assets of more than $9 billion to an appropriate UN agency, expanding sanction exemptions for international organisations dealing with Afghanistan, assisting multilateral organisations to pay salaries of essential workers, and allowing international financial institutions to “inject the necessary economic capital into Afghanistan to stave off the economic meltdown”.

Published in Dawn, December 19th, 2021