Republican Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst slammed the Biden administration on Friday for erroneously sending at least $293 million to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
State Department bureaus failed to properly vet the recipients of $293 million provided for aid to Afghanistan in 2022, raising concerns that the Taliban may have been a beneficiary, according to a Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) report from July. Ernst told President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken in the Friday letter that the mistake was “unacceptable” and demanded they “take immediate action to rectify these issues.”
“After leaving billions in cutting-edge military equipment behind during the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have given the Taliban $293 million in cold hard cash,” Ernst told the DCNF. “The American people deserve better than the complete amateur hour occurring at the White House and State Department. I’m demanding accountability.”
3 Years After US Withdrawal, Afghanistan Looks As Bad As It Did Pre-Warhttps://t.co/A1tvWnpuIx
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 11, 2024
Ernst told Blinken and Biden that the “failure has resulted in an increased risk that terrorist and terrorist-affiliated individuals and entities illegally benefited from your administration’s spending in Afghanistan,” according to the letter. State Department officials previously admitted to SIGAR that the department’s relevant bureaus had not complied with proper document retention and vetting requirements for certain recipients who received aid, resulting in the $293 million in questionable assistance, according to the July SIGAR report.
Ernst introduced a bill in 2023 that would compel the U.S. government to track and publicly disclose any federal funds being sent to organizations in Russia and China. Her office told the DCNF that she recently amended the bill to include other organizations like the Taliban.
“The blood, and now the taxes, of American citizens are in the hands of the Taliban thanks to the Biden-Harris administration, which should be sanctioning rather than subsidizing the terror group’s activities. This lack of accountability and abuse of taxpayer money is grossly unacceptable,” Ernst told Biden and Blinken in the letter.
The Biden administration has helped deliver a total of $2.8 billion in humanitarian and development aid to Afghanistan since the U.S. withdrew from the region in 2021. There have been several reports that aid has not been properly tracked or delivered in certain cases, running the risk that some of it may have been diverted to the Taliban or other extremist groups.
Three years after the withdrawal, Afghanistan has largely returned to the state it was in prior to the U.S.’ 20-year intervention. The Taliban has seized control of Afghanistan and has been accused of imposing an authoritarian rule and committing a variety of human rights abuses, particularly against women.
Al-Qaeda — the Islamic terrorist group responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks in New York — has returned to Afghanistan at the allowance of the Taliban, despite Biden’s claims in 2023 that such a scenario had not happened. There is no indication that U.S. forces will return to the region anytime in the near future.
“There is zero U.S. strategy for Afghanistan,” former State Department official Gabriel Noronha previously told the DCNF.
Featured Image Credit: Flickr/Gage Skidmore
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