However, the Taliban is the group handing out NGO licenses in Afghanistan. If a Taliban sympathizer asks for an NGO license, they get it. So, many of these groups send money directly to the Taliban or to support the families of suicide bombers.

Legend also said if the United States suspended these weekly payments, we would see signs of the Taliban and other Afghanistan-based terror groups crumbling within a year. The $40 million weekly cash shipments have stabilized the Afghani, making the Taliban’s newly printed currency the world’s best performer, beating the U.S. dollar in September 2023.

It is not like this administration doesn’t know who they’re dealing with. President Joe Biden was a senator and Vice President Kamala Harris was an attorney in the 1990s when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan with an iron fist. During that time, women were stripped of their rights and treated as prisoners, and the Taliban provided safe haven to al-Qaeda in the years leading up to the 9/11 attacks.

https://burchett.house.gov/media/burchett-opinions/rep-tim-burchett-your-tax-dollars-are-going-taliban

The multidimensional crises facing Afghanistan present a dilemma for the international community. An underlying assumption is that the Taliban will remain in power for at least the immediate future, which will require workarounds and tough compromises if the plight of Afghanistan’s people is to be alleviated to any degree. The large-scale influx of humanitarian aid since the end of 2021 has come largely in the form of physical shipments of U.S. dollars, delivered under the coordination of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) to various UN agencies and UN-partnered international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) operating on the ground. The funds are used to pay staff salaries and procure food and supplies, including covering the costs of imports. As of this year, UN cash shipments remain a critical lifeline for an estimated 23.7 million people at risk in a nation of 41 million. The country’s modest degree of economic stabilization since 2021 is in large part owed to the weekly inflow of these donor funds, which have totaled more than $2.9 billion since the Taliban takeover.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/future-assistance-afghanistan-dilemma#:~:text=With%20respect%20to%20the%20use,of%20the%20financial%20system’s%20revival.

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Premier WarNotes Podcast episode is live Monday 18 November 2024.

Here’s the premier episode of my new podcast, WarNotes: A Conflict Podcast and I am introducing the first series of ‘casts I will do on base-lining problems and offering solutions to the immense military incompetence, malfeasance and rank stupidity that informs so much of contemporary Western military history.

In the companion Chasing Ghosts podcast I produce, I am often scolded on being so overwhelmingly negative in my portrait of America and the west fighting the other conflicts, irregular warfare, historically and contemporaneously so bloody badly. I will seek to lighten the mood a tad there (especially with holidays approaching).

In this new venture, I want to expand my portfolio of investigation and elucidation on war in the broader scope. I want to leave the more arcane and less well-known milieu of the other warfare to examine conventional war and the emerging tableau of near-peer and peer fighting that I am dead certain will raise its bloody hand in this century because humans simply can’t help themselves.

I will paint a dim and shabby picture of the state of American and western arms in this chapter but I want to take a deep dive in the succeeding episodes of what America can do to create a more effective military in the remainder o the 21st century; maybe the defense intellectuals and personnel at the Pentagon and the halls of western military power can pause to reassess, re-frame and find a more realistic means to exercise martial power.

I’ll offer some recommendations.

Notes: https://cgpodcast.substack.com/notes

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I want to thank my listeners and readers for your continuing solicitude. Please leave reviews if you find the time.

Don’t believe the Pentagon is capable of not only accounting for its present year’s spending but the aggregate of materiel and expenditure on its books from past years.

Boldly matching their record for military success, the DoD continues to cook the books it can’t balance.

The Pentagon on Friday failed its seventh audit in a row, with the nation’s largest government agency still unable to fully account for its more than $824 billion budget, though officials stress they are making good progress toward a clean audit in 2028.

***

The goal is to earn an unmodified audit opinion, or a clean audit that says the financial statements are accurate. A qualified opinion says there are omissions and concerns but the finances are generally reliable.

Under Secretary of Defense Comptroller and Chief Financial Officer Michael McCord said that despite the disclaimer of opinion, which he expected, the Defense Department “has turned a corner in its understanding of the depth and breadth of its challenges.”

“Momentum is on our side, and throughout the Department there is strong commitment—and belief in our ability—to achieve an unmodified audit opinion,” he said in a statement.

The Defense Department’s report card as a whole is made up of 28 entities operating under the Pentagon that conducted independent audits.

Of those, nine received an unmodified audit opinion, one received a qualified opinion, 15 received disclaimers and three opinions remain pending. The Pentagon expects the final number of clean or qualified audits to be roughly around what it was last year.

More here: https://nypost.com/2024/10/29/business/boeing-charged-air-force-150k-for-soap-dispensers-watchdog/

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