The USA probably gave 239 million to the Taliban, without any control
A recent report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) revealed that the US State Department may have paid at least $239 million to the Taliban since the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in 2021, more or less accidentally , as reported by themainewire.com. A nice gift for a country whose government is not recognized by the USA.
SIGAR is the U.S. government's primary oversight authority on the reconstruction of Afghanistan. Congress created the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction to provide independent and objective oversight of Afghanistan reconstruction funds.
The Audit Office also noted other serious shortcomings in the Afghan case: The SIGAR report highlights significant gaps in the State Department's compliance with partner selection requirements. Additionally, “State officials acknowledged that not all offices complied with record-keeping requirements,” the Maine Wire wrote, citing the report.
Obviously the fact that the documents relating to this money have disappeared from the State Department gives rise to the worst suspicions: the organizations that received this money are unidentified, which suggests that they could be bodies close to the Taliban, and perhaps this it is the best of all hypotheses, given the type of trafficking that has occurred in Afghanistan, including those related to drugs.
This $239 million figure is separate from the approximately $7 billion in military equipment, including Humvees and Black Hawk helicopters, left behind by US forces, now allegedly in the hands of the Taliban.
The Biden administration's chaotic withdrawal of military forces resulted in the loss of 13 US soldiers and 170 Afghan civilians in a suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport. Furthermore, the decision to evacuate through Kabul's central airport instead of the safer Bagram airport drew widespread criticism.
Later, the Taliban took control of Afghanistan after the United States left. They reportedly founded more than 1,000 nonprofit organizations, which described themselves as humanitarian, and which, according to SIGAR, may have served as fronts to secure U.S. taxpayer dollars.
SIGAR identified significant oversight gaps in two State Department bureaus: the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) and the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL ). The report highlights the increased risk that these funds may have been misappropriated or redirected to organizations associated with the Taliban.
Meanwhile, the report mainly recommends that these offices comply with existing control procedures. However, it does not call for disciplinary action against those responsible for the verification failures or suggest stopping funding to Afghanistan, raising concerns about accountability and the continuation of potentially misappropriated funds. So those responsible for the lost funding will not even be punished. How do you say magna-magna in Washington bureaucratic parlance?
The war in Afghanistan, America's longest foreign conflict, has cost an estimated $2.261 trillion to U.S. taxpayers and claimed the lives of 2,448 American service members and 3,846 military contractors. The war also claimed the lives of more than 45,000 Afghan civilians.
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The article The USA probably gave 239 million to the Taliban, without any control comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/gli-usa-hanno-regalato-239-milioni-probabilmente-agli-talebani-senza-nessun-controllo/ on Fri, 09 Aug 2024 12:51:59 +0000.