Afghanistan Gets $122.5 Mil to Combat Gender-Based Violence Under Taliban With No Follow Up

(Judicial Watch)—In the latest scandal to rock the Biden administration’s massive Afghanistan aid boondoggle, the U.S. government has been derelict in its duty to measure the effectiveness of a $122.5 million investment to combat gender-based violence (GBV) in the Islamic nation after the Taliban took over, according to a federal audit. The investigation, conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), also reveals that the administration failed in this case to follow government practices for monitoring implementation of its foreign assistance award. That includes collecting required progress reports, validating the data in those reports through site visits and other verification means and assessing the periodic performance reports of groups receiving taxpayer dollars to implement programs. Additionally, the State Department, the agency disbursing the cash, did not even “include any goals for preventing and responding to GBV in Afghanistan,” investigators found.

Since the abrupt 2021 U.S. military withdraw, nearly $3 billion in humanitarian aid has flowed to Afghanistan and a chunk of it has gone to the Taliban, the terrorist group that currently runs the country. Judicial Watch has reported on this extensively, documenting hundreds of millions of dollars in American aid going to the Taliban this year alone. This occurs because the State Department fails to properly vet award recipients to comply with its own counterterrorism partner vetting requirements in Afghanistan and the money has gone to dozens of local entities with potential terrorist ties. The agency has a system to identify whether prospective awardees have a record of ethical business practices and is supposed to conduct a risk assessment to determine if programming funds may benefit terrorists or terrorist-affiliates before distributing American taxpayer dollars. But the State Department does not bother and fails to keep proper records.

The Taliban has also received a substantial portion of American aid by creating fake nonprofits that go unvetted by the U.S. government. Specifically, the Taliban is benefiting from American education funding through the establishment of fraudulent non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to receive donor assistance. Since the terrorist group returned to power in August 2021, Uncle Sam has continued to fund Afghanistan’s education sector through six programs that cost $185.2 million even though the Taliban has issued decrees drastically limiting access to education for girls and women as well as restricting women’s ability to work and other basic freedoms. The extremist group has also infiltrated local NGOs delivering educational assistance by targeting and extorting Afghans who receive monetary support from U.S.-funded education programs under the guise of taxation. NGOs are also coerced to hire Taliban supporters or purchase goods from Taliban-owned companies.

There is no telling where the hundreds of millions of dollars for gender-based violence have gone, and the feds do not seem terribly concerned about it. Since October 2020, the U.S. has spent $237 million on 31 GBV-related programs in Afghanistan, with more than half of it—$122.5 million—doled out after the collapse of the Afghan government between September 2021 and October 2022. More than two years after the Taliban took over, the audit confirms that the U.S. government has not updated its strategies to assure the programs succeed under terrorist rulers. Prior to the abrupt U.S. military withdraw the former Afghan government with the help of American support established the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and enacted the Elimination of Violence Against Women criminalizing rape in Afghanistan for the first time and numerous other acts of violence against women, including forced marriage, underage marriage, and giving away women and girls as restitution for crimes. The Taliban has killed most of the reforms, according to human rights groups cited in the report. “For example, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs no longer exists, the 2009 Elimination of Violence Against Women law is largely unenforced or ignored, and nearly all 30 women’s shelters that were still open in September 2021 to support and care for GBV survivors are closed,” SIGAR writes.

Yet the U.S. taxpayer dollars keep flowing, even though the State Department’s Special Envoy for Afghan Women, Girls, and Human Rights confirms the Taliban wants to erase Afghan women and girls from society, prohibiting them from accessing education or working in most sectors, restricting freedom of movement, and effectively banning them from public. “Those who raise their voices to protest or resist risk harassment, detention, and violence,” the probe found.