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The US government’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction released a report Wednesday that alleges members of the Taliban are “colluding” with senior UN officials to redirect international aid for their own ends.
The inspector general’s office, created in 2008 to independently monitor US involvement in the rebuilding of Afghanistan after its 2001 invasion, recently issued its final report to Congress ahead of its scheduled closure next year.
But its latest report, shared first with Semafor, takes a more pointed look at the Taliban’s use of US and international aid dollars that were intended to help the country govern itself.
“We knew that US aid dollars were specifically, directly and indirectly, benefiting the Taliban,” a senior State Department official with knowledge of Afghanistan said in an interview. “What was surprising to me is how integrated many of the NGOs, in particular, the United Nations, was into some of this diversion and corruption.”
The report concludes that the Taliban’s laws make it difficult for non-governmental organizations to operate effectively and at times “enable diversion” of aid. Minority populations in Afghanistan have been given “spoiled or rotten food” as a result, according to the report, and the Taliban have interfered in NGO hiring to choose its favored candidates, according to multiple sources it cites.
President Donald Trump set the stage for US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2020, when he presided over the signing of an agreement with Taliban representatives. But after Joe Biden succeeded him, the US embarked on a 2021 pullout that proved chaotic and was marked by the death of 13 troops from a terrorist attack.
Since taking office for his second term, Trump has terminated nearly all US aid to Afghanistan as part of his shuttering of the US Agency for International Development and his reorganization of the State Department.
The report issued Wednesday identifies a “culture of denial within the international aid community” about the Taliban’s misuse of assistance dollars, in the words of acting special inspector general Gene Aloise.
According to one NGO worker who spoke with the inspector general’s office known as SIGAR, “at least 20 percent of the employees of international NGOs were affiliated with the Taliban.”
The SIGAR report added: “In some cases, the Taliban require an NGO to put a person on their payroll to collect a salary without ever showing up to work.”
The report also interviewed individuals who alleged that the Taliban “collude with UN officials to extort bribes from UN contractors and then split the profit.”
“Most of the allegations SIGAR heard involved employees of the World Food Programme, which has been the largest single recipient of both US and overall aid to Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover,” the report adds.
The State Department official who spoke with Semafor described one source for the report — “an NGO official responsible for distributing food to beneficiaries” through the UN’s World Food Programme — who said that the head of the food program was aware of what was described as “routine” illicit behavior by the Taliban.
According to the report, the US provided nearly $4 billion in aid for the Afghan people between August 2021 and this year, when Trump wound down the effort.
The report suggests that “around 30 to 40 percent” of total donor funds sent to Afghanistan end up reaching their intended audience.
The UN did not immediately return a request for comment on the allegations in the report.
Aloise first joined the inspector general’s office in 2012 after a decades-long career with the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office.
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Past reports by SIGAR have detailed the ways in which US aid has ended up helping the Taliban, but the Wednesday report more specifically dives into allegations of aid diversion.
The “turning point” for the Trump administration when it came to ordering the effective end of US aid to Afghanistan, the State Department official told Semafor, was its growing awareness that the Taliban had begun welcoming US assistance.
“They’re able to divert US aid dollars, both in the form of currency going through the UN cash shipments, as well as in the form of services and goods for their own benefit,” the State Department official said. “And so, as you’re seeing the rhetoric shifting to the Taliban saying ‘we need more assistance, the global world order has abandoned us,’ et cetera — the question is, why is there this shift?”
SIGAR’s recommendations in the report include requiring any US agency administering aid to “have full access to UN performance and financial reporting,” as well as possibly changing the flow of future aid to ensure the State Department can effectively limit how many organizations have access to it.
Notable
- The US restored food aid to several nations in April, but Afghanistan was not one of the countries, The Associated Press reported at the time.
- Formally classifying the Taliban as a foreign terrorist organization is now under review by the Trump administration, per Al-Jazeera.