This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, February 22, I'm Caleb Brown.

President Biden has made a couple big promises with respect to seized assets from the Central Bank of Afghanistan.

Some of that money will go to the families of 9-11 survivors and some will go to the people

of Afghanistan.

There are some problems with those promises.

Cato adjunct scholar Sahir Khan comments.

When Afghanistan fell, when the United States had, you know, months earlier,

many, many months earlier announced a departure from Afghanistan and Joe Biden followed through on that departure from Afghanistan.

The central government very quickly collapsed. The Taliban was ready to fill the vacuum and as we have learned since

then was ready to fill the vacuum for quite a while and had been working for years to establish

credibility around the capital.

And then the Taliban took over and became the de facto government of Afghanistan

including the Central Bank of Afghanistan.

So let's go back in time a little bit here

and understand when the United States

has a beef such as 9-11 where Americans have been killed with the assistance of a foreign

government in this case it was the Taliban-led government in Afghanistan in 2001.

What was the legal action taken in US courts?

And then we'll get back to the more recent action in Afghanistan.

So the legal action taken by the families of the victims of the 9-11 attacks

was basically to sue the Taliban for aiding Al-Qaeda and they sued them in U.S. courts. Now before we even talk

about those cases it's important to realize that you know ever since World War II

...