by Daniel Greenfield
Terrorists are being funded in plain sight.
As the Taliban were taking over Afghanistan, I predicted that Biden would fund the Taliban using “humanitarian aid” as a pretext. Since then, Biden has provided $1.1 billion in Afghan aid.
Despite assurances that the money would not go to the terrorists, the Biden administration issued global licenses authorizing financial transactions with the Taliban and the Al Qaeda allied Haqqani Network that include the “delivery and provision of humanitarian aid”.
Biden looted $3.5 billion from money awarded to the families of 9/11 victims in a lawsuit against the Taliban and put in a “trust fund” to provide “humanitarian aid”. His DOJ then went to court arguing that the judgment for the victims was too large and that it interfered with the Biden administration’s foreign policy in Afghanistan.
Now an Australian Broadcasting Corporation report has revealed massive stacks of hundred dollar bills sitting on the tarmac at Kabul International Airport. ABC noted that “the picture is just one of several images of United States $100 notes boxed, bagged, or bound in plastic, posted on Twitter by the Taliban-controlled central bank of Afghanistan in recent weeks.”
ABC quoted an expert who suggested that there was a lot more than $40 million in the shipment.
“Especially on the runway, it may have been hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said.
A day earlier the bank had announced that it “wants to auction up to (14) million US dollars”.
The purpose of such dollar auctions is to stabilize the value of the ‘Afghani’, the country’s currency, against the dollar. The “humanitarian aid” here appears to consist of millions of dollars being shipped into a terrorist state to prop up its otherwise worthless currency.
The bank claims to have received “humanitarian aid” of $40 million in hundred dollar bills. And the bank described it as the second shipment of cash that had arrived in one week.
Overall this is the third such shipment amounting to $120 million.
The exact origin of the money is unclear, but the packaging is in English and that together with the currency, suggests that it’s either being sent by the Biden administration or with its consent.
A previous shipment of $40 million in August showed bags of cash being flown in through Ariana Afghan Airlines, which had been used to fly Al Qaeda terrorists, drugs and guns, but has been subsidized to charter hostage evacuation flights by the Biden administration.
In the intervening months it has yet to be clarified where all this cash is actually coming from.
The one thing that is abundantly clear is that the concept of humanitarian aid has been perverted into massive shipments of money into terrorist zones, in violation of sanctions, without even the pretense that the money is buying food, medicine or anything we associate with aid.
Propping up Afghanistan’s economy by providing it with a ready supply of cash has been reinterpreted as humanitarian aid when it’s actually foreign aid. But the Biden administration does not want to admit that it’s providing terrorists with massive amounts of foreign aid.
There’s nothing that Biden won’t do for the Taliban that he won’t classify as humanitarian aid.
In November, Front Page Magazine exclusively revealed that the Biden administration had been working to enable the Taliban to print money. The Biden administration admitted that it was “working hard with international banks to facilitate payment transfers from Afghanistan’s central bank to European printing companies where new banknotes would actually be produced” to “replace what had been crumbling banknotes in Afghanistan.”
What else is the Biden administration moving to the Taliban?
Not only Front Page Magazine or members of Congress, but even the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction can’t get any answers.
The State Department and Samantha Power’s USAID have gone so far as to order their personnel to refuse to cooperate with audits of their Afghanistan spending. State and USAID stonewalled the inspector general’s office, refusing to reveal “funding information regarding its ongoing programs in Afghanistan, citing ongoing consultation with its legal counsel”.
The special inspector general’s office revealed that USAID and the Treasury Department “refused to cooperate… in any capacity.”
In December, Rep. McCaul sent yet another letter to Secretary of State Blinken, Power and Treasury Secretary Yellen, warning that their refusal to cooperate with the special inspector general’s office “is a flagrant violation of the law and part of a lengthy pattern of obstruction by the Biden Administration” .
One of the stonewalled audits, according to a letter from the inspector general’s office to Samantha Power, “evaluates your agencies’ compliance with the laws and regulations prohibiting transfers of funds to members of the Taliban and the Haqqani Network.”
If USAID were in compliance with laws on transferring money to terrorists, it wouldn’t be refusing to cooperate with an audit. Every new revelation about the terror cash pipeline makes the administration look worse. The latest Afghanistan watchdog report strongly suggested that the Taliban had gotten access to $57 million sent to the Afghan government before the fall.
“Once the money was transferred, US agencies lost visibility over those funds and relied on the Afghan government to disburse funds for their intended purposes,” the report warned.
But that $57 million pales in comparison to the over $1 billion in Afghanistan aid.
As bad as Biden’s retreat was, the aftermath is even more troubling. The Biden administration has robbed 9/11 families to fund terrorists. It’s stonewalling an inspector general within the federal government while moving massive amounts of money into a terrorist state.
All of this is happening even as the Taliban are openly using sharia punishments and abusing women. The myth of a kinder, gentler Taliban has fallen apart, but the money keeps coming.
And that’s not all.
A “high-level delegation” that included a top CIA figure met with the Taliban and agreed not to “fund any armed groups or non-state actors in the country”, particularly the Northern Alliance members who had originally helped us liberate Afghanistan.
What if anything have the Taliban offered in exchange for agreeing to betray our allies?
That’s one of the many unanswered questions about what Biden is doing in Afghanistan. The disastrous retreat could look like a comedy of errors, but it’s looking less accidental all the time.
An explosive conclusion to be drawn from its aftermath is that the Biden administration had set out to enable a Taliban takeover and then to prop it up using financial, military and political mechanisms. The stonewalling and the cover-ups, which include trying to classify every substantive congressional briefing, paint a much darker picture about a hidden agenda.
Over a decade ago, Obama set out to topple most of our allies in the Middle East and replace their governments with brutal Islamist tyrannies dedicated to the same values as the Taliban.
His old staffers appear to be continuing Obama’s work in Afghanistan.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is
an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and
Islamic terrorism.
Source: https://www.meforum.org/63907/iran-protests-inside-the-kurdish-uprising-against
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