Proving again that the Biden-Harris administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was and continues to be an unmitigated failure of leadership, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) recently released another damning report on how American taxpayers are funding the Taliban via unaccountable bureaucrats flaunting counterterrorism vetting requirements intended to prevent U.S. support for terrorists.
If the State Department and its various bureaus that handle disbursement of taxpayer funded aid and grants were operating as they should, risk assessments and evaluations of prospective recipients would be conducted to ensure any eventual recipients are not tied to terrorists or their affiliates. This vetting seems like a no-brainer and a critical process to prevent hardworking Americans from supporting or aiding terrorists who want to kill them.
The State Department under Biden and Harris, however, has botched and mismanaged Afghanistan since the planning for a U.S. withdrawal began. From being caught off-guard by the Taliban’s march to Kabul, failing to preserve assets needed for an orderly evacuation, lacking a plan to avoid leaving American citizens and U.S. allies behind to now being unable to prove that it’s following required vetting procedures to avoid funding the Taliban terrorists.
According to the SIGAR audit of five State Department bureaus that had active awards in Afghanistan between March and November 2022, only three were in compliance with required vetting standards to mitigate and ideally prevent taxpayer dollars from funding terrorists and their affiliates.
Two State Department bureaus could not prove they had followed the partner vetting requirements in Afghanistan: Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) and International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL).
The bureaus “were unable to provide supporting documentation for many of their respective awards,” according to the SIGAR report, and the Biden State Department “could not demonstrate their compliance with its partner vetting requirements on awards that disbursed at least $293 million in Afghanistan.”
The DRL and INL bureaus, according to the audit, “also did not comply with federal document retention requirements because supporting documentation to demonstrate their compliance with State partner vetting requirements was missing from the bureaus’ award files.” Even worse, Biden officials at the State Department knew and acknowledged that “not all bureaus complied” with such retention requirements.
This rot of unaccountability comes from the highest levels of the Biden-Harris administration, including Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. No one was held accountable at the highest levels of the State Department, Pentagon, or White House for the disastrous and deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan or its aftermath. So why would lower-level bureaucrats administering aid and grant disbursement worry about following required guidance?
As documented in previous SIGAR reports on the Biden-Harris administration’s abysmal handling of Afghanistan before, during, and after withdrawing U.S. forces from the country, American taxpayers have already been proven to be “benefitting the Taliban-controlled” government via payments — for things like taxes, fees, duties, or utilities — made by taxpayer-funded nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and public international organizations (PIOs)
One SIGAR report in May tracked down $10.9 million worth of such payments since August 2021 but said that is “likely only a fraction of the total amount of U.S. assistance funds provided to the Taliban” because “UN agencies receiving U.S. funds did not collect data or provide relevant information about their subawardees’ payments.”
Again exposing the lack of care for accountability that is tolerated by the Biden administration’s senior officials down the chain of command, the SIGAR report revealed that, when a questionnaire was was sent to partners receiving taxpayer dollars for work in Afghanistan, responses were received from just 38 of the 65 partners.
It seems like stopping and preventing American taxpayers from funding the Taliban — directly and indirectly — should be a priority. For the Biden-Harris administration, it clearly is not. Remember: keeping hardworking Americans from watching the fruits of their labor benefit the terrorist government wouldn’t be a problem if the Biden-Harris administration hasn’t handed Afghanistan over to the Taliban.
