From the early days of the U.S. military’s unconstitutional occupation of Afghanistan, when Geraldo Rivera reported on the ground about the U.S. government protecting the local poppy crop – a move that increased the Afghani exports of opiates and ran counter to the vaunted (also unconstitutional) federal so-called “War on Drugs” – to the Biden administration’s chaotic 2021 withdrawal that left behind $7 billion in military equipment a federal bureaucracy called “SIGAR” – short for Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction – has issued 67 “reports” supposedly telling people about what the feds call “reconstruction” of Afghanistan.
And, although most Americans evidently have been unaware of the “Afghanistan reconstruction” that they’ve been forced to fund, some people have taken note of the dark, unscrupulous nature of it, and of some of its most enraging outcomes.
For example, last September, Congressman Tim Burchett (R-TN) and SIGAR reminded us of an ongoing, grotesque reality: U.S. taxpayers have been propping up the Taliban for decades.
But this is merely the tip of a sordid iceberg, as the U.S. government’s complicity with radical groups -- from Afghanistan’s poppy fields to Syria’s battlegrounds -- reveals a pattern of moral and fiscal recklessness that should outrage every liberty-loving American.
SIGAR reports that the Taliban also likely pocketed $57.6 million in funds originally allocated to the fallen Afghan government. But the real kicker? Weekly cash shipments of $40 million, funneled through the United Nations, have been stabilizing the Taliban’s economy since September 2021. These funds, laundered via the UN and delivered to the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan Central Bank, have made the Afghani the world’s best-performing currency in September 2023, outpacing the U.S. dollar. Congressman Burchett’s source, an Afghan-American veteran known as “Legend,” confirms that these payments directly bolster the Taliban and their Haqqani Network allies, with NGOs—licensed by the Taliban—serving as conduits for cash to people the US also tells us are terrorists. (You can see a fascinating clip of the Congressman discussing this on YouTube.)
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Now, Fox News reports that DOGE has uncovered even more dark money and lunacy in U.S. Afghanistan policy, allowing us to see a more granular picture, and focusing on one member of the Taliban, in particular.
“Earlier this year, DOGE discovered the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) had transferred $132,000 to Mohammad Qasem Halimi, a former Taliban member who was Afghanistan's former Chief of Protocol. DOGE announced on March 31 that the contract was canceled.
Halimi was detained by the U.S. and held at Bagram Air Base for a year beginning Jan. 2, 2002. He held several positions in Afghanistan's government following his release and was appointed as the Minister of Hajj and Religious Affairs in Afghanistan in 2020.”
You read that correctly. The U.S. held him for a year without trial (a move that, by itself, breaches half the Bill of Rights). Then, after the feds released him, he became a bureaucrat in Afghanistan, and…received a treasure-chest of our money.
Fox’s Jesse Watters let DOGE spell it out:
"’A small agency called the United States Institute of Peace is definitely the agency we've had the most fight at. We actually went into the agency and found they had loaded guns inside their headquarters — Institute for Peace,’ a DOGE staffer told Watters. ‘So by far, the least peaceful agency that we've worked with, ironically. Additionally, we found that they were spending money on things like private jets, and they even had a $130,000 contract with a former member of the Taliban. This is real. We don't encounter that in most agencies.’"
Burchett’s H.R. 6586, passed in June 2024, aims to stop taxpayer dollars from reaching the Taliban, but it’s a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. The recipient of the US funds is not the most important matter. The most important matter is the fact that the US government is not supposed to be taking our money and sending it to anyone overseas, whether it is to “reform” a nation or fund one of the many US dark-world “regime changes” that numerous presidents have loved so much.
Whether it is paying-off big-wigs in an Afghan narco-economy that enriched warlords and insurgents while U.S. troops played security for drug lords, or the U.S. government’s dalliances with radical groups like the al Nusra Front (a rebranded al Qaeda affiliate) through CIA programs like Timber Sycamore in Syria. Many of these so-called moderates were anything but.
With arms and cash flowing to jihadists, including al Nusra, who fought alongside U.S.-backed groups against the Assad regime, the Pentagon’s own reports admitted that vetting was shoddy, yet the spigot remained open. By 2016, the U.S. was occupying roughly a third of Syria, including oil-rich regions, under the pretext of fighting ISIS. American forces often coexisted with terrorist groups, sharing battlefields and intelligence while claiming to combat them. This wasn’t a war on terror; it was a geopolitical chess game, with U.S. taxpayers footing the bill for both sides.
The hypocrisy is staggering. In Afghanistan, the U.S. claimed to fight the Taliban while guarding their drug profits and, post-withdrawal, sending them weekly cash. In Syria, the U.S. preached democracy while arming jihadists who shared al Qaeda’s ideology. The cost? More U.S. debt, untold civilian deaths, more instability, and more contempt for the U.S. Constitution.
Burchett’s “Legend” suggests that halting these $40 million weekly payments in Afghanistan could cripple the Taliban within a year. Yet, the State Department resists oversight. SIGAR’s John Sopko testified in 2023 that he couldn’t assure taxpayers their money wasn’t funding the Taliban, citing stonewalling by federal agencies. In Syria, the U.S. withdrawal from most occupied zones by 2019 didn’t end the flow of arms or influence to radical groups; it merely shifted the burden to proxies. The pattern is clear: Washington’s foreign policy thrives on perpetuating conflict, not resolving it, and the unconstitutional money funnel sends the cash to very dangerous characters whom the US often tells us, without a hint of embarrassment over the hypocrisy, that they are terroristic enemies.
Given the track record of the feds, this is unlikely, unless more Americans assiduously vocalize their disenchantment with much of the Washington internationalist establishment and its foreign welfare cronies.