Afghanistan's $10 billion is being held by the country that signed its peace deal

A think tank, an old guard, and an interim cabinet

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Raoof Hasan in two capacities at once: Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Information, and Chief Executive Officer of the Regional Peace Institute, a think tank that has been running bilateral track-two and track-1.5 dialogues with Afghanistan for seven or eight years. The framing matters. Raoof is not speaking only as a government spokesman; he is speaking as someone who has been in the room with Afghan counterparts for the better part of a decade.

Muzamil moves quickly to the moment at hand. The Taliban’s interim cabinet has just been announced, and the names are not what international observers had been led to expect by the Taliban leadership’s own earlier statements. Raoof concedes the point without flinching. The cabinet, he says, “comprises the old guard, and they’re all very devoted members of the Taliban” — people who governed in the 1990s and who fought through the twenty-year war. But he asks listeners to keep two things in view. It is an interim arrangement, and it is incomplete. More ministers, including women, are expected in a second consignment, and other Afghan stakeholders will need to be folded in to satisfy what the international community now calls an “inclusive government.”

The tone is set early: not defensive, not triumphalist, but methodical.

The American contradiction

The episode’s sharpest argument arrives within minutes, and it shapes everything that follows. Raoof draws a direct line between the United States’ February 2020 deal with the Taliban and its current refusal to recognise them.

“The Americans,” he says, “were the ones basically who legalised, legitimised Taliban, by signing the deal, back in 2020.” The deal had two clauses: in exchange for a Taliban commitment that Afghan soil would not be used for terrorist activity, the Americans gave a timeline for the withdrawal of troops. That, in Raoof’s reading, was de facto recognition not just of the Taliban as an entity but as the potential rulers of Afghanistan. “Otherwise, how do you seek this kind of commitment from a nobody?”

The contradiction is that Washington now wants the Taliban to “earn” legitimacy all over again — by transforming Afghan society along Western lines. Raoof points to the SIGAR papers as the documentary record of how badly the twenty-year project to engineer that transformation failed. “Twenty years of utter, total, shameful failure in Afghanistan. And they still expect that Afghanistan is going to be transformed along those lines. That’s not happening.” Muzamil sharpens the image with a line that lands: it is “like asking the bird to fly while cutting the wings off.”

The $10 billion that isn’t aid

From the political contradiction the conversation moves to the financial one. Approximately ten billion dollars of Afghan foreign exchange reserves are frozen in New York. Raoof’s framing is unambiguous: “Technically, this money belongs to the state of Afghanistan, and I don’t think any country has a right to hold that money back, irrespective of which government is there.” It is legally Afghan, it cannot be held back, and labelling its release as humanitarian aid is a category error.

He extends the point to the chaos at Kabul Airport in the days after the takeover. Western press, he says, repeatedly called that scene a humanitarian crisis. He disagrees. Those were economic migrants — people offered an exit to a country with better prospects. The real humanitarian crisis is the slower one now unfolding inside Afghanistan: a state with no revenue, a population with no money for food, and a Western financial freeze that has cut off both. He notes that China has stepped in with a tranche of roughly $300 million and that Pakistan and Qatar jointly requested the United States to release the frozen funds — Qatar’s deputy minister, who also holds the foreign minister portfolio, was in Islamabad the day before the recording.

Why change has to evolve, not be imposed

Muzamil poses the chicken-and-egg question that sits underneath every Western demand on the Taliban: do you ask for social revolution first, or economic revolution first? Can a state with no money to feed its people be expected to transform its cultural structure on a Western timeline?

Raoof’s answer is one of the most considered passages of the conversation. “Change evolves. It is never imposed.” Western democracies, he points out, did not become what they are overnight, and they were certainly not built by dictators with whips. Afghanistan is a tribalised society that lives by the Pashtunwali code; anyone who violates it becomes an outcast. He is, he says, “totally committed to the fact that change must occur in Afghanistan, but you can’t force it to happen.”

The order he proposes is concrete. Survive economically first. Earn money. Create the conditions for the government to build schools and health centres. Then, and only then, do social changes follow as a consequence — not as a precursor. He grants that twenty years of exposure have made Afghan society more sensitive to freedoms, more aware of them, and that those expectations are not going to be rolled back. But the trajectory is incremental. “I expect it to remain a tribalised society, but a tribalised society which is on the way to improving with the passage of time.” Muzamil’s gloss — incremental evolution — gets a direct echo back from the guest.

The graveyard of empires, and the Afghan-led solution

Muzamil asks why Pakistan keeps insisting publicly on an “Afghan-led solution.” Raoof answers by walking back through the same lesson three empires have already paid for. The British tried. The Soviets tried. The Americans tried. “They’ve gone back, pretty embarrassed.” The label “graveyard of empires,” he says, is not coined without reason.

What follows is not isolationism. Help, support, and encouragement can and must be extended; interference cannot. “We have to stand with Afghanistan. Whatever they are. They may not be exactly like us. They may definitely not be like the West. But the fact is, we have to help them and encourage them to move on and change as they move on.” It is a careful distinction — between standing with a country and trying to engineer it — and it runs through the rest of the discussion.

Mineral wealth, CPEC, and three parallel tracks

When Muzamil asks what Afghanistan actually has to work with economically, Raoof lays out three parallel tracks. First, Afghanistan’s untapped mineral wealth, which has sat underground through forty years of war. Second, the Taliban’s stated inclination to join the Belt and Road Initiative and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which would extend the trail into the Central Asian states and open productive avenues for the country. Third, regional cooperation to provision basic needs — either through money to the Afghan government, or through immediate revenue-generating projects on the ground.

The neighbours, he notes, have already met twice, and on Pakistan’s suggestion they have decided to invite Afghanistan to participate at the next foreign ministers’ meeting. China is leading. Russia is expected to chip in. Turkey may eventually be folded into the group. The principal responsibility, he argues, rests with this circle.

The strategic power corridor

Asked about the broader regional logic — why Pakistan is suddenly signing memoranda of understanding with countries like Uzbekistan that did not feature in its media a year ago — Raoof offers a phrase he says he has used in his own writing: the strategic power corridor. China, Russia, Pakistan, and the region around them, in his framing, are the nucleus of a corridor whose power emanates from economic development. China is already there. Pakistan and the others have a long way to go. The link between Afghan stability and regional connectivity is, for him, the load-bearing wall of the entire thesis.

He ties this directly to the Pakistani government’s own publicly stated shift from geo-security to geo-economics. “Peace in Afghanistan means peace in the region. Peace in the region means economic activity in the region. Economic activity in the region means generation of resources to eliminate poverty.” He places the country’s pivot back to its neighbours in long historical context: “Way back nineteen forty-eight, forty-nine, we opted to shake hands across 15,000 kilometres of turbulent waters.” Seventy-three years later, he says, Pakistan is finally playing its cards in its own region.

Iran’s noise, India’s cover

Two regional players get specific treatment. On Iran, Raoof reads the recent flare-up — odd foreign-ministry statements, curated-looking protests — as the friction of a country that is “a little concerned about the fact that they are not playing the lead role, which has fallen into Pakistan’s kitty.” He plays it down. The ambassadors met in Kabul. Iran is already linked to China. If CPEC moves forward, Iran moves with it. He does not “attach much importance to it.”

On India, the assessment is colder. Raoof describes a two-pronged strategy: visible investment — hospitals, schools, the parliament building — as goodwill cover for an NDS-enabled programme to push terrorists into Pakistan across the western border, particularly into Balochistan. Pakistan, he says, repeatedly handed dossiers to the Karzai and Ghani governments, and was repeatedly ignored. With the Taliban in charge and committed not to allow Afghan soil for terrorist activity, that channel has shut. The attempt to resuscitate the Northern Alliance through Amrullah Saleh and Ahmed Massoud, both now in Tajikistan, has no regional sponsor. “Even Iran will not extend support to India to destabilise Afghanistan because it doesn’t serve Iran.”

Muzamil takes the conversation into the texture of Indian primetime — Arnab Goswami’s set, video-game clips passed off as footage of Pakistani jets in the Panjshir Valley, American analysts on the panel openly contradicting the host. Raoof reads it as fifth-generation warfare, with fake news as the primary instrument. He is more troubled, he says, by mainstream Western outlets — BBC, CNN — and figures like Christine Fair and the former Canadian ambassador Chris Alexander giving credence to “a level of lunacy.”

The patience the West cannot read

Muzamil asks why Washington’s think tank class appeared so blindsided. The answer becomes one of the most quoted-internally lines of the episode. What the world watched compress into two to four weeks, Raoof says, was actually two years of patient work. The Taliban were forging partnerships with their traditional enemies along every approach route to Kabul. “These one and a half to two years, they were engaged in a different kind of war. They were nullifying their opposition.” By the time they moved forward, there was no enemy left in the field except the government in Kabul.

DC think tankers, he says bluntly, could not read it. “They are unwilling to believe that there are intelligent people living in this part of the world. I’ve sat across the table with them. They feel that intelligence only belongs to them.” It is the same blindness that produced twenty years of trying to install a Western democracy in a society whose ground conditions were never going to accept one.

He returns to the theme that runs underneath the whole episode: the most formidable weapon the Afghans have is patience. “Forty years of fire, unremitting fire, and they live on. It’s an unbelievable nation.”

Cold war, Europe, and 2050

The last stretch of the conversation widens out. Will there be a new Cold War, and if so, will it be economic or military? Raoof has no doubt about the Western intent to impose one, particularly as China’s projected ascent to the world’s largest economy keeps getting pulled forward — first 2040, then 2029, now 2024 or 2025. But he does not think the region can afford it, and he does not think India — burdened by 1.2 billion people and severe poverty — can afford it either. He hopes the inherent wisdom of Indian leadership prevails, despite Modi being, in his words, “an exception to that rule.”

He adds an unexpected third pole to the picture: Europe. The American shakeup under Trump, he says, has prompted serious thinking in European think tanks and capitals about playing an independent role. Five years, ten years — he will not put a timeline on it — but a Europe that steps out from under the American shadow would, in his view, produce a more balanced world. Three poles, not two. Healthy competition rather than cold war.

Asked by Muzamil where Pakistan and the region will be in 2050, his closing image is consistent with everything that has come before. If there is peace in Afghanistan, connectivity will deepen. China leads. Russia is more or less on board. Iran remains a question mark, but engagement continues. The region acts as one. He sees this bloc, by 2050, as the leader in the world — provided India eventually understands that its future belongs to its own neighbourhood, not 15,000 kilometres away.

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil draws the obvious thread. Raoof has spent an hour arguing that peace in Afghanistan, money for Afghanistan, and the future of the entire region are the same problem stated three different ways. The West is not going to solve it. The neighbours will have to.