{"id":31767,"date":"2023-04-20T07:45:16","date_gmt":"2023-04-20T07:45:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/?p=31767"},"modified":"2026-07-10T02:58:37","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T02:58:37","slug":"i-cannot-assure-american-aid-is-not-currently-funding-the-taliban-sigar-chief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/2023\/04\/20\/i-cannot-assure-american-aid-is-not-currently-funding-the-taliban-sigar-chief\/","title":{"rendered":"‘I cannot assure American aid is \u2018not currently funding the Taliban\u2019- SIGAR Chief"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, SIGAR, on Wednesday, told the US Congress that he cannot say with certainty that United States aid to Afghanistan is \u201cnot currently funding the Taliban.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhile I agree, and we all agree Afghanistan faces a dire humanitarian and economic situation, it is critical that our assistance not be diverted by the Taliban,\u201d SIGAR chief John Sopko said as he testified before the US House Oversight Committee. \u201cUnfortunately, as I sit here today, I cannot assure this committee or the American taxpayer we are not currently funding the Taliban.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNor can I assure you that the Taliban are not diverting the money we are sending from the intended recipients, which are the poor Afghan people,\u201d Sopko added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The SIGAR chief meanwhile asked the US Congress for help in getting the Biden administration to cooperate with its investigations in the wake of the US withdrawal and the Taliban\u2019s takeover of the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sopko mentioned its issues with getting access to information and interviews.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last summer, Sopko criticized the State Department and US Agency for International Development for \u201csudden refusal to cooperate,\u201d which they pushed back on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe need your help to stop this obfuscation and delay\u201d from the State Department and, to a lesser extent, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Sopko testified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs I\u2019m sure my fellow inspectors general would agree, we cannot abide a situation in which agencies are allowed to pick and choose what information an IG gets or who an IG can interview or what an IG may report on. If permitted to continue, it will end SIGAR\u2019s work in Afghanistan, but also Congress\u2019 access to independent and credible oversight of any administration,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

While US aid continues to flow to Afghanistan, \u201cunfortunately so do many of the problems that SIGAR has identified over the past decade, including problems that led to the collapse of the Afghan government and security forces,\u201d which is compounded by the lack of full cooperation from the agencies, Sopko said in his prepared statement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He said that as a result, the office \u201con the extent to which our government may be funding the Taliban and other nefarious groups with U.S. taxpayer dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMore troubling, State and USAID have instructed their employees not to talk to SIGAR, and in one recent instance, State told one of its contractors not to participate in a SIGAR audit,\u201d Sopko added in his statement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The SIGAR chief\u2019s concerns were echoed in his office\u2019s fifth high-risk list released in conjunction with the hearing. He also noted in his prepared statement that the office has previously had issues getting information from the Pentagon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSIGAR\u2019s audits are an important part of Afghanistan-related oversight,\u201d said a spokesperson for the State Department as quoted by US media. \u201cWe have raised questions related to SIGAR\u2019s jurisdiction with respect to activities after August 2021,\u201d which \u201cremain unresolved,\u201d said the spokesperson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNonetheless, the Department and USAID have provided SIGAR written responses to dozens of questions, as well as thousands of pages of responsive documents, analyses, and spreadsheets describing dozens of programs that were part of the US government\u2019s reconstruction effort in Afghanistan,\u201d said the State Department spokesperson as quoted by Government Executive. \u201cWe are frequently, regularly working with SIGAR within the scope of its statutory mandate.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When asked about the alleged stonewalling during the briefing on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, \u201cThe administration has consistently provided updates and information and including\u2026thousands of pages of documents, analysis, spreadsheets and written responses to questions, hundreds of briefings to bipartisan members and also their staff, public congressional testimony by senior officials all while consistently providing updates and information to numerous inspectors general.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, Republicans on the committee have publicly raised concerns about the issue for a while now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis administration not only continues to provide excuses for the self-inflicted humanitarian and national security catastrophe, but senior officials are actively obstructing meaningful congressional oversight,\u201d said James Comer, chair of the oversight committee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Kweisi Mfume, ranking member of the committee\u2019s panel on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce, addressing Sopko, said that Congress and particularly, Democrats on the oversight committee in the previous session of Congress, \u201crepeatedly, encouraged and pushed agencies to cooperate with SIGAR,\u201d so he was frustrated to hear the agencies haven\u2019t given their full cooperation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Underscoring what Jamie Raskin, ranking member, said earlier in the hearing, \u201cIt\u2019s the intention of this committee to always support the work of inspectors general; if we don\u2019t do that then it\u2019s pretty difficult for us to move forward with any sense of legitimacy,\u201d Mfume added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amid some partisan swipes during the hearing, members from both parties discussed possibly issuing a joint letter of support for the IG community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The State, USAID, and Defense IGs\u2013\u2013also present at the hearing\u2013\u2013testified they are not having access issues with the executive branch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This comes after the Biden administration on April 10 released a report on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. The chaos was blamed on Trump, whose administration had signed the Doha agreement with the Taliban in 2020, without input from US allies nor the government of Afghanistan at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AMU<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, SIGAR, on Wednesday, told the US Congress that he cannot say with certainty that United States aid to Afghanistan is \u201cnot currently funding the Taliban.\u201d \u201cWhile I agree, and we all agree Afghanistan faces a dire humanitarian and economic situation, it is critical that our assistance not be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":31772,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_post_source_name":"","_post_source_url":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[4836,4342,6850,11554,5178,7099,6369,9233,6693,2961,12326,539,6576,8875,9309,2264,10954,11493,5612,7693,11973,6719,10917,6575,5807,5655,7333,5319,9262,6348,12992,6571,2982,3954,10415,594],"class_list":["post-31767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-news","tag-access","tag-afghanistan","tag-aid","tag-audit","tag-biden","tag-bipartisan","tag-chaos","tag-collapse","tag-congress","tag-contractors","tag-decade","tag-delay","tag-democrats","tag-doha","tag-dollars","tag-government","tag-international","tag-interview","tag-money","tag-national-security","tag-one","tag-pentagon","tag-poor","tag-republicans","tag-risk","tag-security","tag-summer","tag-taliban","tag-united-states","tag-us","tag-us-allies","tag-white","tag-white-house","tag-will","tag-work","tag-who"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31767"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52291,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31767\/revisions\/52291"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}