Afghanistan Gets $122.5 Mil to Combat Gender-Based Violence under Taliban with no Follow Up
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In the latest scandal to rock the Biden administration’s massive Afghanistan aid boondoggle, the U.S. government has been derelict in its duty to measure the effectiveness of a $122.5 million investment to combat gender-based violence (GBV) in the Islamic nation after the Taliban took over, according to a federal audit. The investigation, conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), also reveals that the administration failed in this case to follow government practices for monitoring implementation of its foreign assistance award. That includes collecting required progress reports, validating the data in those reports through site visits and other verification means and assessing the periodic performance reports of groups receiving taxpayer dollars to implement programs. Additionally, the State Department, the agency disbursing the cash, did not even “include any goals for preventing and responding to GBV in Afghanistan,” investigators found.
Since the abrupt 2021 U.S. military withdraw, nearly $3 billion in humanitarian aid has flowed to Afghanistan and a chunk of it has gone to the Taliban, the terrorist group that currently runs the country. Judicial Watch has reported on this extensively, documenting hundreds of millions of dollars in American aid going to the Taliban this year alone. This occurs because the State Department fails to properly vet award recipients to comply with its own counterterrorism partner vetting requirements in Afghanistan and the money has gone to dozens of local entities with potential terrorist ties. The agency has a system to identify whether prospective awardees have a record of ethical business practices and is supposed to conduct a risk assessment to determine if programming funds may benefit terrorists or terrorist-affiliates before distributing American taxpayer dollars. But the State Department does not bother and fails to keep proper records.
https://www.judicialwatch.org/afghanistan-gets-122-mil/
