Veterans outraged at US cash benefiting the Taliban via the UN: ‘This has to stop now’
Frustration and outrage are mounting among a bevy of prominent veterans over a report detailing how US currency is flowing into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and propping up the regime that American soldiers fought against for decades.
Late last month, a government watchdog organization on Afghanistan released a report concluding that since December 2021, the United Nations alongside a constellation of other groups has helped funnel some $3.8 billion worth of US currency into the Taliban-led nation.
At times, this includes the UN literally flying US cash into Afghanistan through transportation firms, per the report.
While that money is typically then moved to UN partners in Afghanistan, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) found that the US cash flow has both “directly and indirectly” benefited the Taliban.
“The humanitarian assistance facilitated by the shipments provide indirect benefits to the Taliban by stabilizing and legitimizing them, because the funds allow the Taliban to focus on their priorities and policies instead of providing essential services to the Afghan people,” the SIGAR report explained.
SIGAR also concluded that “under the guise of income taxation, the Taliban have targeted and extorted money from some recipients of direct cash assistance.”
In a separate report released in May, SIGAR ascertained that at least 38 organizations had paid upwards of “$10.9 million worth of US taxpayer money to the Taliban-controlled government.”
SIGAR stressed that “US currency is difficult to trace” and that “the Taliban now have a greater ability to circumvent the controls of the international banking system that are intended to limit the Taliban’s ability to conduct money laundering and fund terrorism.”
In other words, while entities such as the State Department and the US Agency for International Development have processes in place to ensure that American dollars don’t wind up in the hands of organizations like the Taliban, there are workarounds.
For many veterans, this revelation was a gut punch.
“This has to stop now. We are sending billions of dollars to the Taliban while failing to take care of our veterans who are struggling day-to-day with both physical and mental wounds,” Mark “Oz” Geist, founder of the Shadow Warriors Project, told The Post.
“This is not only a slap in the face of every servicemember who served in the 20 years of war with Afghanistan and the Taliban it things even more so to those 13 families that bore the loss of their loved one when they were killed at Abbey Gate,” he added.
Geist further excoriated the revelation as “appalling and a disgrace to those who have served in sacrificed so much.”
In August 2021 just as the US was winding down its operations in Afghanistan and withdrawing its forces, an ISIS-K terrorist detonated a suicide bomb and killed 13 American soldiers at Abbey Gate in Hamid Karzai International Airport.
Shawn Ryan, a former Navy Seal and CIA Contractor who hosts his own podcast, similarly hearkened back to Abbey Gate.
“As a veteran who served in Afghanistan during the Global War on Terror, the notion of the US funding the Taliban is morally reprehensible and fundamentally against our national security interests, especially as we approach the three-year anniversary of Abbey Gate,” Ryan said.
Scott Mann, a former Green Beret and veteran PTSD advocate, explained that many veterans have received “high fidelity information” from resistance fighters in Afghanistan that corroborates SIGAR’s report.
“US funds — marked as humanitarian relief and counterterrorism dollars in Afghanistan — are being funneled into operationalizing, planning, and preparation of terror operations against US interests, and the homeland,” he told The Post.
Chad Robichaux, a Marine who founded The Mighty Oaks Foundation and helped spearhead one of the largest private rescue operations out of Afghanistan in 2021, ripped into the State Department.
“Once again, the US State Department has failed to properly manage US taxpayers’ dollars. This time, $293 million has ended up in the hands of the Taliban terror regime, potentially funding future attacks on America,” he said.
“When will enough be enough, and when will this administration be held accountable for the safety and security of our nation and its citizens?” he added.
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) introduced legislation in June intended to prevent the Taliban from reaping benefits off US cash.
“The Afghanistan withdrawal is one of the Biden administration’s greatest failures,” he told The Post. “This administration has also sent the Taliban millions of taxpayer dollars since then. I introduced a bill to prevent this administration from sending one more penny to these terrorists, but it’s ridiculous I had to do that in the first place.”
Back in March 2023, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas), who is overseeing a sprawling review of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, had asked SIGAR to investigate US funds in Afghanistan.
“The Biden administration must take immediate action to prevent US taxpayer dollars from going to the Taliban. I am grateful to SIGAR for their ongoing work to provide oversight of US funding to Afghanistan,” he previously said in a statement.
But clamping down on US currency flows into the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is not without potential pitfalls.
SIGAR suggested to McCaul in a letter last month that Congress should weigh “whether the benefits that US currency shipments provided to the Taliban regime outweigh the economic and humanitarian benefits
associated with the shipments.”
Afghanistan is widely documented to be facing an acute poverty and hunger crisis in the aftermath of the US withdrawal. Roughly 6.5 million children in Afghanistan are estimated to be nearing crisis levels of hunger, according to the nongovernmental organization Save The Children.
Among the population, an estimated 15.8 million Afghanis were projected to “experience crisis and emergency levels of food insecurity” in 2024, according to the UN. A prior estimate from the UN in 2022 projected that 9 in 10 Afghanis were living in poverty.
SIGAR explained in its July report that Afghanistan had weathered a liquidity crisis, which prompted the UN to funnel US currency into the beleaguered nation, and that the American dollar is its “primary source of liquidity.”
“Due to the Afghan economy’s reliance on US currency shipments, SIGAR found that a reduction or cessation of the shipments would result in a reversal of the economic and humanitarian gains,” the watchdog wrote.
Controversially, the Taliban in Afghanistan is not on the State Department’s list of designated foreign terrorist organizations, though Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan is on it.
Several lawmakers, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), have previously furnished legislation to designate the Taliban in Afghanistan as a terrorist organization, but so far, the effort hasn’t succeeded.
