This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
In the aftermath of a decision by President Donald Trump's DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, essentially to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development and transfer a few remaining workers and responsibilities to the Department of State, a columnist has released a stunning report.
It charges that USAID ultimately was responsible for the delivery of billions of dollars in American cash to the Taliban.
A description of the events that transpired, leaving the Taliban with $2.9 billion in American cash, was provided by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, at the Gatestone Institute.
He explained how the DAB Afghanistan Bank boasted of $40 million in stacks of hundred-dollar bills "sitting on the tarmac at Kabul International Airport."
He said the Taliban-run bank called it one of three shipments of "humanitarian aid" totaling more than $100 million.
At the time, the bank was run by Noor Ahmad Agha, a "specially designated terrorist" who had been accused of financing "bomb-making" including IEDs that killed more than 1,000 American soldiers.
"While no international organization was willing to admit to the cash-smuggling operation, the ultimate responsibility lay with USAID," the report said. "The $40 million on the tarmac was part of a much larger scheme under which USAID and the State Department provided over $1.7 billion in funding to the UN, which then shipped $2.9 billion in cash to Afghanistan."
At the time, it was illegal for U.S. banks to process such transfers to the Taliban.
"USAID was helping finance an illegal operation to circumvent sanctions on terrorists," he wrote.
The report said USAID claimed it did not provide "currency" to the Taliban because the money instead went to the United Nations' "pooled accounts."
What happened was that the $1.7 billion was sent to the U.N., which "used some of the money to buy dollars to fly into Afghanistan, to trade for Afghan currency, which the U.S. had also arranged to have printed on behalf of the Taliban."
The report charged, "USAID funded the U.N., which used an intermediary to purchase the hundred-dollar bills from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where Afghanistan's wealth, claimed by the Taliban, was being held, then contracted with a company, quite possibly Osama bin Laden's old airline, to fly it to Afghanistan, deposit it in banks, allocate it to NGOs and then use DAB to convert the dollars into local Afghan currency."
Ned Price, then a spokesman for the State Department, said the plan was to "address one of the aspects of Afghanistan's ongoing liquidity crisis."
Greenfield reported the situation actually "is even worse than it sounds," as DAB arbitrarily set the exchange rate for afghanis and dollars "at a far higher rate than the black market exchange rate."
He said, "The money laundering operation required multiple steps and plausible deniability for USAID, the State Department and the U.N., which insisted that '[n]one of the cash brought into Afghanistan is deposited in the Central Bank of Afghanistan nor provided to the Taliban de facto authorities by the U.N.' To the extent this was true, it was because the money was deposited in a 'private bank,' allocated to NGOs funded by the U.N., which then exchanged it with DBA's assets."
