How USAID Shipped Bags of Hundred Dollar Bills to the Taliban
Planeloads of cash. Zero accountability.
by Daniel Greenfield
February 18, 2025 at 5:00 am
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[T]he ultimate responsibility lay with USAID. The $40 million on the tarmac was part of a much larger scheme under which USAID and the State Department provided over $1.7 billion in funding to the UN, which then shipped $2.9 billion in cash to Afghanistan.
Under the guise of humanitarian needs, $1.7 billion was provided to the UN, which used some of the money to buy dollars to fly into Afghanistan, to trade for Afghan currency, which the U.S. had also arranged to have printed on behalf of the Taliban.
The cash is not provided to the Taliban or DAB by the UN, but by the groups funded by the UN.
During the intermediate step, DAB held "auctions" of the dollars which elements linked to the Taliban, including the Haqqani network allied with Al Qaeda, reportedly "win." The auctions prop up the Afghan currency and keep the Taliban in power.
Putting the money into UN pooled accounts allowed USAID to claim that they "do not provide assistance to or through the Taliban", they just put money into "pooled UN accounts..."
The State Department responded to these revelations by falsely claiming that there are no sanctions on Afghanistan, that banks refuse to carry out wire transfers because of "the lack of profitability" and that "to the best of our knowledge, no electronic financial delivery systems are currently scalable to meet the liquidity needs of the UN" requiring it to instead convert billions of dollars into paper notes and ship them by plane. None of this is true or even a plausible lie.
The Taliban money laundering scheme was not an exception. It was how USAID, the State Department and the UN have operated for too long, not only in Afghanistan, but in Syria, Yemen, Gaza and many other terrorist areas around the world, using plausible deniability and chains of organizations to avoid accountability and direct responsibility for aiding terrorists.
Americans have become the financiers of their worst enemies. It's time for that to stop.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21402/usaid-funding-taliban
