‘People don’t realize that we are sending billions and billions of dollars to Afghanistan — a country we have pulled out of — which is now being overseen by our enemies,’ Congressman Tim Burchett tells the Sun.
As the Trump administration works to cut unnecessary government spending, lawmakers in Washington are hoping to draw President Trump’s attention to the billions of taxpayer dollars that they claim are falling into the hands of the Taliban.
“Americans are done watching their money flow to terrorists. They want it stamped out, and they want it stamped out now,” a congressman from Tennessee, Tim Burchett, proclaimed last month ahead of a press conference on his No Tax Dollars for Terrorists Act.
The legislation, which was originally introduced in December 2023, calls on the State Department to ensure that American financial aid in Afghanistan is not going to the Taliban. Mr. Burchett was first made aware of the problem by a former United States Army officer known by the pseudonym “Legend.” He traveled to Kabul during the American withdrawal to help get out Afghans who had helped the Americans. “Legend,” who was of Afghan descent, discovered the Taliban’s scheme.
“People don’t realize that we are sending billions and billions of dollars to Afghanistan — a country we have pulled out of — which is now being overseen by our enemies,” Mr. Burchett tells the Sun. “They steal our money and we just keep giving it to them.”
Although the House passed his bill last year, the Senate Majority leader, Senator Schumer, never brought it to the floor for a vote. Now, with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency taking a close look at government spending, Mr. Burchett hopes that his bill will be revived. “There’s attention on it now,” he tells the Sun.
The New York Sun first raised the curtain on the issue back in 2022, after images of stacks of $100 bills were posted on social media by the central bank of Afghanistan. The cash payments — estimated to total $40 million weekly — had been sent by the Biden administration to help the Afghan people gear up for the winter. Sources, including Legend, told the Sun that the cash had been diverted to Taliban coffers.
Now, after more than two years, a presidential handover, and billions of dollars in aid, the National Resistance Front for Afghanistan — a group opposed to the Taliban — says that the sum total of the covert payments is even higher.
“It’s been widely reported that the Biden administration was sending shipments of U.S. dollars to Kabul on a weekly basis,” the head of foreign relations for the National Resistance Front, Ali Nazary, tells the Sun. “But our intelligence unit has discovered the Taliban received an additional $446 million last year from the Biden administration under Operation Enduring Sentinel” — supposedly a counter-terror operation. The sum could not be independently verified by the Sun.
“Enduring Sentinel” was launched in 2021 by the Department of Defense to combat emerging terror threats in Afghanistan and to engage with partners in Central and South Asia to promote regional stability. Part of the operation included directing aid to various non-humanitarian assistance projects, like national disease surveillance, rural water sanitation and hygiene, even women’s scholarship endowments.
The only problem? Many of these groups are “fake organizations,” Mr. Nazary tells the Sun. He says that the Taliban, using techniques of terror groups worldwide, inject themselves into existing NGOs and take over their advisory boards. “Of course, though, some of them just don’t exist,” Mr. Nazary notes.
Take, for example, the Women’s Scholarship Endowment group, which, according to Operation Enduring Sentinel, “aims to assist Afghan women in obtaining a university or graduate education either in-person or online in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics.” The American government, according to an official report for the operation, forked over $60 million for the effort.
The program, however, seems to have ignored the Taliban’s ban on women in universities in 2022. “Do we really think the Taliban would have such a program? It doesn’t make any sense based on the realities inside of Afghanistan,” Mr. Nazary tells the Sun. The Women’s Scholarship Endowment group has not responded to the Sun’s request for comment.
His group’s intelligence unit compiled a list of some 38 NGOs it claims are serving as fronts for the terror group. Mr. Nazary declined to provide additional details regarding the source of the intelligence, noting that it’s “sensitive information.”
Mr. Nazary’s findings appear to line up with a report published in May 2024 by the American agency that oversees American aid to Afghanistan, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. The agency surveyed 144 nongovernmental organizations and public international organizations in Afghanistan that receive and administer American aid. Of the 65 that responded, 58 percent — or 38 in total — reported paying taxes, fees, duties, or utilities to the Taliban-controlled government.
Mr. Nazary says that the National Resistance Front campaigned to end the flow of aid throughout the Biden administration, but its efforts were disregarded. “The Biden administration just allowed Afghanistan to turn again into a haven for jihadism and terrorism,” Mr. Nazary tells the Sun. “And now we’re seeing that these groups are infiltrating Europe and the United States.”
Mr. Nazary argues that sending financial aid “has just made the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan worse.” His group suggests that the American government work with the Afghan opposition party to “find a policy, an approach, that can benefit both the United States and Afghanistan’s people.”
He is hopeful that the Trump administration will take up the issue. After all, Mr. Trump has called for the Taliban to return American military equipment that was left behind in Afghanistan and has raised concern over America’s humanitarian aid. “We’re seeing strong signs that it will be cut off,” he says.
https://www.nysun.com/article/lawmakers-call-on-trump-administration-to-end-biden-era-afghan-aid-programs-sending-billions-to-the-taliban
