OPINION — “Billions in U.S. assistance continue to flow to Afghanistan to address its ongoing humanitarian and economic emergencies. With the removal of U.S. personnel, U.S. agencies lost the ability to directly observe U.S. assistance programs, raising significant oversight challenges and greatly increasing the risk that aid to Afghanistan will be diverted before it reaches its intended recipients.”
That’s John F. Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), testifying last Tuesday before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
How many Americans have known that, according to Sopko, “Two years after the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the United States remains the largest donor to the Afghan people…This includes more than $2.52 billion in U.S. appropriations for Afghanistan assistance, largely for humanitarian and development aid.”
Another $3.5 billion are funds of the former Afghan government that were on deposit at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, and frozen by President Biden after the Taliban took over the country in August 2021. Last year, the $3.5 billion was transferred to a Swiss-based foundation called the Afghan Fund. In setting up the fund, Sopko said, the U.S. short-term goal was to promote monetary and macroeconomic stability, while the long-term goal is to recapitalize Afghanistan’s central bank.
A year after the Afghan Fund was created, Sopko continued, “the Fund’s board of trustees—which consists of a U.S. Treasury official, a Swiss government official, and two Afghans with backgrounds in economics—is still establishing its operational procedures and has not yet approved any disbursements.”
In addition to the above, the United States has obligated more than $5.08 billion in fiscal years 2022 and 2023 for the Department of Defense to pay for transportation, temporary housing and feeding for tens of thousands of Afghan evacuees, some of whom spent time on U.S. military bases.
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Overall, Sopko’s three hours of testimony not only reviewed the checkered past and odd present state of U.S. aid to Afghanistan, it also opened up as I describe below, a whole new set of problems based on what’s being done with taxpayer money today — all of which is related to the 22-year U.S. involvement with Afghanistan that was prompted by the 9/11/2001 attack on the U.S..
Today, there is a humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.
Sopko said, “The UN estimates 70 percent of the Afghan population, some 29 million people, depend on donor-led humanitarian assistance. “Despite the need, the U.N.’s Humanitarian Response Plan raised only 34 percent of its funding goal for 2023, as of October 30.
“Although the United States remains the largest donor to the plan, having donated over $400 million this year,” Sopko said, “U.N. programs have had to decrease aid. The World Food Program, for example, was forced to stop supplying monthly food assistance to 10 million people this year. The situation will only worsen this winter as weather isolates rural areas from aid services.”
Meanwhile, since the 2021 Taliban takeover, Sopko said, the U.S. has avoided going through the Taliban government – which Washington does not recognize – in supplying humanitarian aid to the Afghan people in key sectors of health, education, civil society, and rights of women and girls.
Of the $2.52 billion in humanitarian aid, Sopko said, the U.S. obligated more than $597 million in fiscal 2022 and 2023 to the Economic Support Fund and Global Health Programs which in turn, supported 36 active programs. These included $194 million for economic growth and public health programs and $97.71 million across six education programs.
State and USAID have used international organizations such as the World Bank, UNICEF and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) to funnel this U.S. aid and then relied on third-party and multi-tiered monitoring to make sure it got there.
However, as Sopko testified, “SIGAR has found that these approaches have not worked as intended in Afghanistan.” He said it was difficult to determine, working through third parties, whether diversion of funds is “sanctioned by Taliban leaders in Kabul or are simply local officials engaging in corruption for personal gain. Blame is further diffused by the fact that much of this interference is committed by working-level officials who have retained their positions from the previous [pro-U.S. Afghan] regime.”
Sopko pointed out that Taliban officials direct NGOs to send aid to their preferred rural populations, overruling NGO assessments of where the need may be the greatest. However, he noted that previous Afghan governments had directed aid disproportionately to cities that they controlled.
He also described anecdotal claims that NGO officials are forced by Taliban officials “to rent cars and houses from them and to award contracts to Taliban-affiliated companies,” or “that companies get contracts to support aid programs because of their relationships with Taliban provincial or district governors…”
After describing other corruption allegations, Sopko said, “SIGAR’s work to date shows there are no good choices for policy makers when providing humanitarian assistance in an environment like Afghanistan — only trade-offs. Policymakers and donors need to be comfortable with the idea that accomplishing one objective will likely come at the expense of another.”
Another problem Sopko described related to Pakistan’s October decision to deport unregistered Afghans lacking proper documentation beginning November 1, 2023. The decision affects an estimated 600,000 Afghans who fled the 2021 Taliban takeover and another million Afghans who were already in Pakistan, having left their home country earlier.
Some 25,000 Afghans in Pakistan, Sopko said, are considered eligible for resettlement under the U.S. Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) program – because they worked for or helped, the American military, its diplomats or USAID programs. Sopko said he was told processing for the SIV program now takes 26 months and as time goes on, it could take years. Asked if SIGAR was looking into that, he replied that the SIV program is now the subject of a State Department IG investigation.
Meanwhile, Pakistan has temporarily exempted the SIV families from being deported back to Afghanistan, Sopko said.
Two-thirds of the way through the hearing, Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-Ill.) asked whether the Taliban were following their obligations with the agreements that led to the U.S. leaving the country. Sopko said that the Taliban may not have broken off connections with terrorist organizations which they were supposed to do; have not abided by humanitarian policies toward women and children, and have not followed promises not to use extrajudicial punishment for the previous government’s officials, soldiers or employees. “I can get you a total list, but they’re not abiding by any of them,” Sopko said.
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That led Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), who while in the Army, had served in Afghanistan, to ask if the U.S. aid was to be, as Sopko had said, “In support of the Afghan people, can you see clearly…what we want out of this for the United States of America?”
Sopko responded, “Currently, right now I don’t think that’s a problem. We don’t really have a strategy articulated by the [Biden] administration as to what we are doing in Afghanistan – a specific strategy for Afghanistan.”
“That’s amazing,” Mast said.
Sopko continued, “That’s a problem we’ve been facing in Afghanistan I think for 20 years. We didn’t really know what our objective was, or it changed, or it morphed…If you don’t know what you want to accomplish, how do you know if you are getting there?…What’s the outcome you want to achieve in Afghanistan? Now, there may be a straight humanitarian aim. We want to help people not starve to death and die. That may be an articulated objective and I’m not saying it’s not a good objective.”
Mast picked up that Sopko had talked earlier about some U.S. aid being justified as “a noble cause.” However, the Congressman added, “But even that, we don’t do that without the purpose of we want to see a friendly government there; or we want to see safety in our embassy or have an embassy there; or we want to see hostages returned. Or is there an end state in humanitarian support for any entity for the benefit of the United States and our taxpayers?”
Just what is the purpose of continued U.S. aid to Taliban-run Afghanistan?
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