The Biden administration has just announced they will be cutting a check for $64 million in “humanitarian aid” to Afghanistan through USAID and Samantha Power.
Supposedly, this aid will go through the UN and NGOs, not through the “government”/Taliban or whoever is currently in control. Here’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken talking about it during his hearing on Zoom with Congress today.
Sorry, but I don’t trust the UN, and who knows who is in charge of some of the NGOs, so even if the money went to those folks, that it wouldn’t end up in the pockets of the Taliban, by force or by design.
Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) questioned Blinken on this earlier today, making the point that they can’t guarantee where that money is going– just like they gave aid to Pakistan while that country was helping the Taliban.
Why would you give aid at this point to Afghanistan, when there’s no way the Biden team can guarantee anything? We had been giving aid to Afghanistan prior to the Taliban taking over, and that had helped shore up the government. Why would we shore up the Taliban at this point, which is what this would do? It’s insane. At a point where Americans were just killed, and with Americans and thousands of Afghan allies still trapped? This is just a monumentally bad decision at this point.
So, one has to ask: is there another reason for this coming at this point? I find the timing of this announcement rather interesting, right after the Taliban let some Americans leave from Kabul, but while Americans are still being kept from leaving in Mazar-i-Sharif, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted. Is this basically a reconstituted “pallets of cash” effort here? Is this why the timing, when it wouldn’t otherwise make sense?
Exactly how much are we paying per hostage now to terrorists? Larry O’Connor at our sister site Townhall.com spells it out: