President Biden is dropping his plan to give billions to the Taliban instead of the families of September 11 victims — even as some of the families want to send the money to Kabul, our Scott Norvell reports. Yet what gave Mr. Biden the idea he has authority over the money at all? Some $7 billion, from Afghanistan’s central bank, sits in the New York Fed. The Taliban has no right to it. A group of 9/11 families was awarded the money in federal court. 

Yet in February Mr. Biden decided that half the money — $3.5 billion — would be set aside “to benefit the Afghan people.” That scheme was based on the delusion that there was “a path for the funds to reach the people of Afghanistan, while keeping them out of the hands of the Taliban.” After months of talks, America’s envoy concluded the Taliban-run nation lacks “safeguards and monitoring in place to manage assets responsibly.”

It was the fact that a top Al Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, and his family had taken up residence at Kabul, next door to a guesthouse of a Taliban cabinet minister, the Wall Street Journal reports, that clued the Biden administration in to the “resurgence of global terrorism emanating from Afghanistan.” It took a year from America’s surrender of Afghanistan to the Taliban to realize the gravity of this threat.

Will it take another year for the logic to sink in that, at this juncture, there’s no way to give financial aid to the Afghans themselves without helping the Taliban regime? Even after dropping the $3.5 billion proposal, the White House insists that there “has been no change in our approach, which always was and remains focused on finding a way for the funds to benefit the Afghan people, while not benefitting the Taliban.”

This endeavor will require overturning one of the fundamental laws of economics, the fungibility of money. The reasoning is on a par with the notion of turning over to the Taliban money that belonged to the Afghan central bank in the first place. As we have observed, the Taliban is like a mass murderer who has broken into someone else’s home, then expects to be given access to the real owner’s bank accounts. 

The proposal was even more egregious in light of the fact that the 9/11 families had already won access to the Afghan money in a federal court judgment in 2012. The families had sued the Taliban for their role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and later won “writs of execution” — court orders — to take possession of the money in the Fed’s vault. The court proceedings over the disposition of the funds have been delayed while President Biden dithers.

Some questions remain unsettled over which families would be included in the distribution of the Afghan billions. That quarrel has devolved into an open dispute over the propriety of using the Afghan money to pay the 9/11 families, Mr. Norvell reported. This dispute, which appears to be a negotiating ploy among the different groups of families, does not bear on the larger question of holding the Taliban accountable for 9/11.

The families had previously “proposed a deal to divide the $7 billion among three categories of recipients if the Biden administration backs them in court,” the New York Times noted in November. It will be easier to resolve the disagreement among the 9/11 families now that the Biden administration has jettisoned its proposal to give away half of the Afghan billions to one of the groups most responsible for 9/11, the Taliban.