Afghanistan’s financial ministry, under the new Taliban government, has developed a draught national budget that is funded entirely without foreign aid for the first time in two decades, according to a spokesman.
It comes at a time when the country is mired in economic crises and confronts a humanitarian disaster that the UN has dubbed a “avalanche of famine.”
The scale of the draught budget, which runs until December 2022, was not disclosed by finance ministry spokesperson Ahmad Wali Haqmal, although he did tell AFP that it would go to the cabinet for approval before being published.
“We are trying to finance it from our domestic revenues — and we believe we can,” he earlier told state television in an interview shared on Twitter.
When the Taliban seized power in August, international donors halted financial help, and Western nations banned access to billions of dollars in assets stored abroad.
Despite receiving 219 billion Afghanis in aid and grants and 217 billion from domestic sources, the former administration’s budget for 2021 predicted a deficit.
The exchange rate was around 80 Afghanis to the dollar at the time, but the local currency has taken a beating since the Taliban’s return, particularly in the last week, with the local currency falling to 130 on Monday before recovering to around 100 on Friday.
Haqmal acknowledged that public employees are still owed several months’ pay, saying that “we are trying our best” to make up for the back pay before the end of the year.
He did warn, though, that a new compensation scale was in the works.
The Kremlin has urged Western countries to unfreeze Afghanistan’s assets in order to provide humanitarian aid and prevent a migrant exodus to Europe caused by the Taliban’s control.
The international community does not recognise the extreme Islamist group that took control of Afghanistan in August after foreign forces abruptly left a two-decade mission.
According to the United Nations, more than half of Afghanistan’s 38 million people are facing food shortages, with the winter forcing millions to choose between migration and famine.
Russia’s envoy to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, claimed the West has been warned that its hold on assets and transfers might cause tens of thousands of Afghan families to “escape to Europe this winter.”
“The West is terrified of migration flows,” he told Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency.
“So let’s unfreeze Afghan money. We must do everything we can so there isn’t any need for hundreds of thousands of Afghan families to leave the country.”
After the Taliban took control of the country and the aid-dependent economy completely collapsed, Washington seized roughly $9.5 billion in assets belonging to the Afghan state bank.
Since then, Russia has expressed alarm over the expansion of terror groups in the nation, particularly the Islamic State, and has warned that terror groups were planning to infiltrate adjacent ex-Soviet countries as refugees.
Kabulov has previously called for Western countries to cooperate with the Taliban and for the European Union to reopen its office in Kabul, warning that the country was on the verge of devolving further into drug trafficking and terrorism.
