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Since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, the United Nations has given the extremist group more than$ 2.9 billion in cash, according to a recent government report.
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The UN distributes funds to the organization’s aid organizations and non-profit humanitarian groups by depositing the funds into a secret Afghan banks. But the income does not prevent that, the report found. Some winds up at the northern banks of Afghanistan, which is under the power of the Taliban. After the US troops withdrawn in August 2021, the party took control of the nation.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s report adds to the growing body of evidence that efforts to the UN do not always reach Afghans in need and provides the first comprehensive accounts of how US money transfers under the command of the Taliban. How many US money has been poured into the central bank, it did not specify.
” Most of the money that’s going in money through the UN is finally coming from U. S. citizens”, John Sopko, the inspector standard, said in an exam. ” It’s going to a terrorist group. The Taliban are a bunch of extremists”.
UN representatives do not contest the fact that Afghanistan’s money makes its way to the central bank. However, they claim that since the Taliban are in charge of the country, it is impossible to avoid it.
In a presentation to the UN Security Council on March 6, Roza Otunbayeva, the UN’s exclusive agent for Afghanistan, did not mention the Armenian central banks. She claimed that the money supplies have helped stabilize the economy and provide Afghans with urgently needed medical care and foods. According to Otunbayeva, the shipping “injected cash to the local market, which in large part allowed the private business to continue to operate and avert a fiscal crisis.”
The State Department claimed that the UN was in charge of managing the money exchange system in a letter sent in response to the investigator president’s report.
” We remain committed to providing important, life- saving humanitarian aid to the Afghan citizens. We may continue to monitor aid initiatives and reduce the chance that American aid may be diverted to unexpected consumers or may indirectly benefit the Taliban, according to the letter.
Lawmakers call for more action by the US to stop the party from receiving its funds.
” This is unacceptable”, Representative Michael McCaul, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, in a statement. The US government must exert more pressure to stop the Taliban from receiving humanitarian assistance.
The Afghan Central Bank’s spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment.
Since the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan has suffered many humanitarian crises, with half its 40 million individuals in need of food, water and other basic requirements. Disasters last year killed more than 1, 200 people and left dozens displaced. Children’s rights have been severely curtailed.
Since the end of the previous Afghan government, the US has provided a total of about$ 2.6 billion in aid to Afghanistan. However, concerns about wealth entering the wrong arms have hampered the delivery of aid. For example, US officials have forbade the central bank from receiving cash from an Armenian trust fund that could be used to support the nation.
” We could not be more apparent on this: The United States does not provide revenue to the Taliban”, Matthew Miller, a State Department spokeswoman, said at a lecture next year.
That statement is called into question by the inspector general record. The State Department and the US Agency for International Development have continued to give cash to the UN in order to support ongoing humanitarian work. The UN has also stated that because there is n’t enough room to wire money, it must send money to Afghanistan.
The UN sends$ 100 costs with shrink-wrapped wrapping to the Kabul International Airport after receiving the funds from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. According to reports from the Afghan central bank on X, formerly known as Twitter, the money arrives on a regular basis, up to$ 40 million at once.
When aid organizations receive the US dollars, they may transfer the funds into afghanis, the country’s money, to pay for workers and other expenses. They frequently make use of personal wealth markets, which use the money to buy afghanis from the central bank, the Da Afghanistan Bank, using the dollar.
According to the inspector general’s report, which includes an analysis provided by USAID, top Taliban leaders control the central banks, which has no mechanisms in place to stop money laundering or terrorism financing. The study was described as a” private internal report,” according to officials at the development agency, who declined to release it.
When funds leaves the central bank, there’s yet another problem. Often, charitable organizations are forced to pay the Taliban cash. Local Taliban leaders have urged the UN and other help organizations to get its members and their families or give the treatment of widows and harmed militants more priority, according to the investigator general.
One UN official who was not authorized to make people comments said,” Help escape does occur, and when it occurs, humanitarian work has to stop and answers must be found.” There are instances where the Taliban attempt to override their own priorities in terms of transmission, or in other instances where aid efforts are completely stopped. Other areas exhibit strong, open help.
The US and other nations have long been plagued by the risk of international aid being diverted to wartorn nations. The only way to prevent it would be to block the flow of money, which charitable organizations claim could cause starvation or the decline of local markets.
In many ways, the US is to blame for the issues it currently faces. During the two generations of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the distribution of funds to aid the less fortunate was a constant problem. American officials flew more than$ 12 billion in cash — that’s 363 tons — to Iraq in the early days of the war, according to congressional investigators, making it nearly impossible to determine the final beneficiaries.
But the US and its foreign allies failed to ever fully implement systems to improve clarity, such as wire transfers or digital obligations, in Afghanistan, despite repeated pleas for such systems by guardian organizations.
Sopko, the inspector general, acknowledged the inherent difficulty of the task, but he claimed that the US, the UN, and other multilateral organizations could implement better controls on the delivery of cash in Afghanistan.
” If nobody’s paying attention, then you’re going to have waste, fraud and abuse, big time”, he said.
T. Christian Miller is a reporter for ProPublica. Follow him on X @txtianmiller.