Congressional committees will soon start delving into the most catastrophic American foreign-policy action since Saigon. Perhaps they should take one lesson from Watergate — follow the money. To set this up, let’s start with a Washington Post report from late yesterday on the Biden administration’s belated attempt to keep the Taliban from accessing Afghanistan’s assets in the international banking system:

The Biden administration on Sunday froze Afghan government reserves held in U.S. bank accounts, blocking the Taliban from accessing billions of dollars held in U.S. institutions, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The decision was made by Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and officials in the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, the people said. The State Department was also involved in discussions over the weekend, with officials in the White House monitoring the developments. An administration official said in a statement, “Any Central Bank assets the Afghan government have in the United States will not be made available to the Taliban.” The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss government policy not yet made public.

Cutting off access to U.S.-based reserves represents among the first in what are expected to be several crucial decisions facing the Biden administration about the economic fate of that nation following the Taliban takeover. Afghanistan is already one of the poorest countries in the world and is highly dependent on American aid that is now in jeopardy. The Biden administration is also likely to face hard choices over how to manage existing sanctions on the Taliban, which may make it difficult to deliver international humanitarian assistance to a population facing ruin, experts say.

That’s certainly a good idea, but perhaps a few days late, considering the status of the former central government. It appears that the Taliban didn’t have time to gain access and exploit these assets, so better late in this case than never. It’s possible that the US might allow the rump government in the Panjshir apparently being formed by vice president Amrullah Saleh to access the assets to help build an anti-Taliban force, but at the moment it would probably just trigger a Taliban offensive in the region nearby Kabul.

The US might have to use those assets to ransom Americans trapped in Kabul, too. You can bet that the Taliban will seize some just to underscore that point, once they get around to checking their bank accounts.

However, don’t be fooled by the seemingly reactive step described in the Post. Stars & Stripes reported on the Taliban’s violent suppression of protest in Jalalabad earlier, but they also included a curious development on the monetary front. The US didn’t add to those accounts as scheduled, and the head of Afghanistan’s central bank has some suspicion as to why:

In a sign of the difficulties any future Afghan government will face, the head of Afghanistan’s Central Bank said the country’s supply of physical U.S. dollars is “close to zero.” Afghanistan has some $9 billion in reserves, Ajmal Ahmady tweeted, but most is held outside the country, with some $7 billion held in U.S. Federal Reserve bonds, assets and gold.

Ahmady said the country did not receive a planned cash shipment amid the Taliban offensive.

“The next shipment never arrived,” he wrote. “Seems like our partners had good intelligence as to what was going to happen.”

Did they? The intelligence community certainly claims that Biden and his team had all the intelligence they needed to predict these outcomes. The military and State Department, as well as the White House itself, denies that and says they planned around the contingencies of the intel they had at hand. If that’s the case, though, why didn’t the Biden administration make its scheduled transfer to the Ghani-led central government?

If congressional committees want to get to the bottom of who knew what and when, the cash trail would be a pretty good thread to pull. That is, if they’re truly interested in getting to the bottom of this historical disgrace.