By Zan Times staff
A new U.S. report shows that the Taliban are using international aid to consolidate their grip on power. On July 30, the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) released its latest quarterly report into aid programs that use U.S. funding.
It is plain-spoken when it comes to assessing the interference of the Taliban regime in aid distribution: “It is no longer a question of whether the Taliban are diverting assistance from our programs to help the Afghan people, but rather how much they are diverting,” writes John Sopko, the current special inspector general, in his introduction to the report.
An analysis by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) which was referenced in the SIGAR report, shows: The Taliban-UN relationship “may be summarized through the understanding that the Taliban appear to view the UN system as yet another revenue stream, one which their movement will seek to monopolize and centralize control over.”
USIP analysis found that the Taliban are “pushing for ever-increasing degrees of credit and control over the delivery of aid” and characterizes the Taliban’s approach as a pursuit of “an exclusive monopoly over state power and many other avenues of authority, including economic activity and social engineering.”
The Taliban have methodically consolidated control over aid. In the months after the Taliban seized power in August 2021, it fired many civil servants in ministries that oversee foreign aid and development and replaced them with Taliban loyalists, reports USIP. As well, “wave of increasing encroachment by certain offices into the practices of aid organizations—perhaps most notably in the emerging requirement for NGOs and agencies to sign restrictive/invasive MOUs [memoranda of understanding],” states the USIP analysis.
SIGAR’s report to the U.S. Congress echoes what Zan Times found in its April 2023 investigation, “How the Taliban pilfer humanitarian aid.” Our journalists interviewed 42 people, including employees of aid organizations and civic leaders, in eight provinces of Afghanistan, to show how large amounts of humanitarian aid are being taken by the Taliban and its supporters from those who need it most, or distributed based on a population’s political, ethnic, regional, and sectarian affiliations. In effect, Zan Times found that the aid has become a source of funding for the Taliban and its supporters.
The Taliban are getting bolder in their interference of humanitarian efforts. “This quarter, Taliban interference with NGO work escalated, leading to a steady decline in humanitarian access in 2023, with a 32 percent increase in incidents between January and May 2023 as compared to the same period in 2022,” the SIGAR report states. And, as Zan Times also found, SIGAR notes that “the Taliban are comfortable accepting foreign support insofar as they can closely monitor the organizations, including restricting and controlling them, and claim some credit for the provision of the benefits.”
The changes to the aid sector have left humanitarian workers “incredibly vulnerable,” the SIGAR report writes. In one case in June, Taliban intelligence detained a midwife on her way to work. Reportedly, she was threatened with violence and quickly resigned from her NGO.
There’s no doubt that the need for humanitarian aid is great, and growing. A total of 28.8 million out of Afghanistan’s estimated 42 million people are in need, the UN reports. And that number increased by 500,000 in just the last quarter.
So many Afghans are desperate for help that the United Nations is continuing its operations – which are relied on by at least 15 million people – despite the Taliban barring women from working with the international agency or any other non-government organization. Still, a UN survey of NGOs found that only one third of 175 responding organizations were still fully operating after the Taliban ban on female workers, and of those still continuing, 42 percent had their women staff working from home.
However, the UN is warning that donor support is faltering. In June, the UN cut the funding goal for its Humanitarian Response Plan by 30 percent, or US$1.3 billion, the SIGAR report states.
What the exhaustive SIGAR report shows is how the Taliban are using aid to its own advantage. Not only are they attempting to control the narrative by winning credit for the aid that is still delivered in Afghanistan, but the Taliban are also seeking to use any aid reduction as an excuse for why its own spending on essential social programs, including welfare, poverty alleviation, health care, and education, is so perfunctory. In other words, the Taliban will continue to take advantage of humanitarian aid – whether it is provided, or not.
