“The humanitarian assistance facilitated by the shipments provide indirect benefits to the Taliban by stabilizing and legitimizing them, because the funds allow the Taliban to focus on their priorities and policies instead of providing essential services to the Afghan people,” the SIGAR report said.
It said that “under the guise of income taxation, the Taliban have targeted and extorted money from some recipients of direct cash assistance.”
The report said that “US currency is difficult to trace” and that “the Taliban now have a greater ability to circumvent the controls of the international banking system that are intended to limit the Taliban’s ability to conduct money laundering and fund terrorism.”
That means that while the State Department, for example, has safeguards in place to ensure funds do not benefit the Taliban, there are ways to work around it.
