Daniel Greenfield
Gatestone Institute, Feb. 18, 2025
“USAID’s money laundering scheme not only used the UN to send a fortune in dollars to the Taliban, it allowed their terrorist bank to run a “dollar cartel,” buying dollars from the UN through its NGOs at favorable rates and then covertly reselling the dollars back in Pakistan to its dollar cartel at much better rates as the Pakistani rupee struggles against the dollar.”
In 2022, the DAB Afghanistan Bank showed off photos of $40 million in stacks of hundred dollar bills sitting on the tarmac at Kabul International Airport. The Taliban-controlled central bank described this as one of three shipments of “humanitarian aid” amounting to over $100 million.
DAB, Afghanistan’s central bank, was headed by Noor Ahmad Agha, a “specially designated terrorist” who had been named as the “financier of bomb-making”, including the IEDs which had killed over 1,000 American soldiers, and sending money to a sanctioned figure was illegal.
Despite that, someone had sent a massive fortune in U.S. cash to the Taliban’s terror bank.
While no international organization was willing to admit to the cash-smuggling operation, the ultimate responsibility lay with USAID. The $40 million on the tarmac was part of a much larger scheme under which USAID and the State Department provided over $1.7 billion in funding to the UN, which then shipped $2.9 billion in cash to Afghanistan.
The cash had to be physically shipped because it was illegal for U.S. banks to provide it to the Taliban. USAID was helping finance an illegal operation to circumvent sanctions on terrorists. …SOURCE