Daniel Greenfield
September 27, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog
Deborah Lyons, the head of the UN mission in Afghanistan, met with
Sirajuddin Haqqani, a wanted terrorist with the Haqqani Network, a
Taliban component with close ties to Al Qaeda.
Lyons
had served as Canada's ambassador in Kabul when the Taliban carried out
a suicide bombing against a Canadian embassy convoy. Lyons put up a
monument to the security contractors who were wounded and killed, but
they
sued after being abandoned afterwards.
Sirajuddin Haqqani is a wanted terrorist with a $10 million FBI reward on his head.
“It
is impossible to provide humanitarian assistance inside Afghanistan
without engaging with the de facto authorities,” U.N. Secretary-General
Antonio Guterres warned.
The de facto authorities being the Islamic terrorists of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
The
official word is that the Taliban won’t stop the UN humanitarian
operations. Whether or not the Taliban will refrain from taxing the UN’s
proposed $1.2 billion aid boom is another question.
Without
waiting for that question to be settled, Biden has not only kicked in
$64 million, but the Treasury Department issued a license for
Afghanistan aid which states that it, "will continue to support the
continuity of the U.S. government’s important humanitarian-related work
in the region", while claiming that "we have not reduced sanctions
pressure on Taliban leaders or the significant restrictions on their
access to the international financial system."
The Taliban and
most “humanitarian” groups in Afghanistan are using the Islamic Hawala
system which enables international finance and massive terrorist
fundraising at the same time.
And “humanitarian aid” is one of
the best ways to fund Islamic terrorists. The Taliban impose an Islamic
tithe which American taxpayers will end up paying once the millions in
aid arrive.
The Taliban had set up its Commission for the
Arrangement and Control of Companies and Organisations at least over a
decade ago. Much like the old Afghan government, it made few
distinctions between for-profit companies and non-profit charities, and
taxed them both.
When the United States was in control of
Afghanistan, USAID and the UN were exempted from government taxes. That
was only fair considering that the vast majority of Afghanistan’s money
came from USAID and the UN. But the local Afghan “implementing partners”
paid taxes to the government and if they did business in Taliban
territory, they also paid off the Jihadists.
We don’t know exactly how much taxpayer money went to the Taliban, but one survey found that contractors priced in
20% to 30%
from their contracts as payoffs. More formally, the Taliban tend to
charge a 10% Islamic tax on income and a 2.5% Islamic wealth tax. While
this is modest compared to taxes in some western socialist countries,
the only service the Taliban provide is not killing you. That doesn’t
require much infrastructure, but is really valuable on the ground.
Every
charity and humanitarian group has denied paying taxes to the Taliban
because it’s illegal. All of them, or almost all of them, are likely
lying because otherwise they’d be dead.
The Taliban had an
extensive and sophisticated tax collection network long before they took
Kabul which included all the usual elements of bureaucracy,
registration, certificates, and assessments. They
even have “NGO coordinators” who work with non-profit groups.
As an Economist article
noted, "Britain’s Foreign Office had to remind ngos not to pay taxes to the Taliban."
The Taliban at one point provided a list of non-profits that
had registered with
their Commission for the Arrangement and Control of Companies and
Organisations. The group “included UN agencies, national and
international NGOs and human rights organisations” including those that
“rely on funding from a wide range of sources, including both the UN
and the US government”.
That was back in 2013 when the Taliban had far less power and were less intimidating.
It’s
a safe bet that nearly every non-profit still operating in Afghanistan
is registered with the Commission, and was probably registered in
previous years, and is paying off the Taliban.
Even if the UN
succeeds in exempting its operations from taxes, the “implementing
partners”, local Afghan groups, will still pay taxes to the Taliban. And
their employees and those of the groups they fund will certainly be
taxed. If the United States funds doctors and clinics, they will be
taxed (as they were before the fall of Kabul), if we fund teachers, they
will pay taxes to the Taliban, and so will every beneficiary of our
“humanitarian aid”.
"We can maintain a humanitarian commitment
to... the Afghan people in ways that do not have any funding or
assistance pass through the coffers of a central government," Ned Price,
Biden’s State Department spokesman, falsely claimed.
Price knows that’s a lie.
Even
if the humanitarian aid doesn’t initially pass through the Taliban’s
coffers, it will inevitably end up there as it works its way through
Afghanistan. Even if we just shipped food and medicines, the Taliban
will take its ‘cut’ of the medicine and food as they used to before.
They will then be able to dispense it to their supporters or resell it
on the black market. Both are common practices for Islamic terrorist
groups like the Houthis in Yemen or Hamas in Israel.
That’s why
it’s common for there to be a “humanitarian crisis” in terrorist
hellholes like Yemen or Gaza. No matter how much aid is sent in, the
crisis never goes away because the terrorists not only steal the aid,
they deliberately create the crises so that they have more aid to steal.
The only way to stop the crisis is to either kill the terrorists or at least stop sending them aid.
The
10% in the headline is a crude estimate. Any money or aid dispatched to
Afghanistan will resonate back and forth through the economy with the
Taliban taking a cut at every end. And the final amount will be a whole
lot more than the formal Islamic tithe which the Taliban impose.
There is no way to provide humanitarian aid to a terrorist state without funding its regime.
And that will mean difficult moral choices.
When
the Great Famine struck Russia as a result of Communist collectivism,
the United States undertook a massive aid effort, sending $20 million (a
quarter million in today’s dollars) in food aid. The noble effort saved
millions, and bailed out the Bolshevik regime which showed no gratitude
and went on to kill millions anyway. Then it built up a massive nuclear
program while plotting to destroy the United States and murder hundred
of millions of Americans.
No one wants to deny aid to suffering
people, but when the cause of the suffering is a genocidal enemy regime,
subsidizing it only makes things worse. Refusing to provide aid or
normalize economic relations with the Soviet Union might have saved far
more lives in the long run.
The Taliban won because many Afghans
decided to support them or not to resist them. That is a choice that
they will have to live with and learn to regret if anything is going to
change.
Providing aid to Afghanistan will bail out the Taliban.
The more aid we send to Afghanistan, the more powerful, the more secure,
and the more aggressive the Taliban’s ambitions will grow. The harder
the Taliban have to work to maintain control over Afghanistan, the less
scope they will have for terrorism abroad. The more aid we send, the
broader the Taliban’s horizons will grow.
Senator Cory Booker
foolishly argued that aid is a “strategic leverage that we have over the
Taliban.” No, it’s strategic leverage that the Taliban have over us as
the Biden administration and the UN negotiate with the terrorists over
the right to bail out their vicious regime.
Biden kept falsely
claiming that he had to get out of Afghanistan because we couldn’t keep
spending money on the failed state. Yet he began sending more money to
Afghanistan before all of the Americans he abandoned behind enemy lines
had even been evacuated.
After leaving massive caches of weapons
and vehicles for the Taliban to enjoy, Biden is dispatching another $64
million, of which millions will likely end up in the hands of the
Taliban.
The Taliban will impose their Islamic tithe on the aid
that Biden sends to Afghanistan. And taxpayers will be the ones paying
the tithe to support the Taliban’s Jihad against non-Muslims.
Americans aren’t just paying taxes to the government, they’re paying them to the Taliban.
Tags:
Afghanistan,
Biden,
recent,
War on Terror
About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and
the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz
Freedom Center
