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 1. 
 2. Military News


WATCHDOG WARNS US MONEY COULD BE FLOWING TO TALIBAN



Department of Defense Inspector General Robert Storch, left, State Department
Acting Inspector General Diana Shaw, USAID Acting Deputy Inspector General
Nicole Angarella, listen as Special Inspector General for Afghanistan
Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko, speaks during a hearing of the House
Oversight and Accountability Committee concerning the U.S. withdrawal from
Afghanistan, on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, April 19, 2023, in Washington. (AP
Photo/Alex Brandon)
20 Apr 2023
Associated Press | By Farnoush Amiri

WASHINGTON — The watchdog for U.S. assistance to Afghanistan warned lawmakers
Wednesday that American aid to the country could be diverted to the Taliban as
he accused the Biden administration of stonewalling his efforts to investigate.

“Unfortunately, as I sit here today I cannot assure this committee or the
American taxpayer, we are not currently funding the Taliban,” John Sopko, the
Special Inspector for Afghanistan Reconstruction, testified to the House
Oversight Committee. “Nor can I assure you that the Taliban are not diverting
the money we are sending for the intended recipients, which are the poor Afghan
people.”




The stunning disclosure by Sopko comes as House Republicans are using the power
of their new majority to hold the Biden administration accountable over its
handling of the chaotic U.S. withdrawal in August 2021.

It also comes a week after the White House publicly released a 12-page summary
of the results of the so-called “hotwash” of U.S. policies around the ending of
the nation’s longest war, taking little responsibility for its own actions and
asserting that President Joe Biden was “severely constrained” by former
President Donald Trump’s decisions.

Republicans, who have called Biden’s handling of Afghanistan a “catastrophe,”
and a “stunning failure of leadership,” criticized the review and after-action
reports conducted by the State Department and the Pentagon as partisan. The
White House privately transmitted the reports to Congress last week but they
remain highly classified and will not be released publicly.

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Sopko initially started the job in 2012 to oversee U.S. spending in Afghanistan
when there was a large American presence in the country. But since the
withdrawal, the work of the IG has shifted to monitoring the more than $8
billion dedicated to Afghanistan. The lack of U.S. military presence in the
country has made keeping track of the large sums of money flowing into the
country nearly impossible, Sopko said.

He testified Wednesday to Congress that work is more complicated by the fact
that the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have not
been cooperating with his probe since withdrawal and asked for lawmakers' help
in getting access to the necessary documents and testimony.

“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,” Sopko said in his opening testimony. “If permitted to continue, it
will end SIGAR's work in Afghanistan but also Congress’s access to independent
and credible oversight of any administration.”

Sopko, who previously served in oversight roles in the House and Senate,
testified that he had never seen this level of “obfuscation and delay” from any
of the other previous administrations.

Republicans were quick to join in Sopko's criticism of the administration. Even
one Democrat on the committee, Rep. Kweisi Mfume, D-Md., said that he regretted
the agencies' refusal to cooperate.

“I’m going to go on the record and urge all three of those agencies today to
cooperate more so that we might not be in a position of hearing what we’ve heard
today or in a position of frustration like I am right now,” Mfume told Sopko
during the hearing.

The White House on Wednesday called the hearing, led by Oversight Chairman James
Comer, another example of House Republicans’ “political stunts."

“You can expect they will continue to falsely claim that the Biden
Administration has ‘obstructed’ oversight — despite the fact that we have
provided thousands of pages of documents, analyses, spreadsheets, and written
responses to questions, as well as hundreds of briefings to bipartisan Members
and staff and public congressional testimony by senior officials, all while
consistently providing updates and information to numerous inspectors general,”
Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the White House counsel’s office, said in a
statement.

A spokesperson for USAID said Wednesday that the agency “has consistently
provided SIGAR responses to hundreds of questions, as well as thousands of pages
of responsive documents, analyses, and spreadsheets describing dozens of
programs that were part of the U.S. government’s reconstruction effort in
Afghanistan.”

A request for comment from the State Department was not immediately returned.

Since the withdrawal, SIGAR has released several reports, nearly all of them
critical of both Biden and Trump's handling of how to remove U.S. troops from
Afghanistan in its final months.

Over the past two years, Sopko said his staff has requested numerous documents
and interviews with officials who were involved in the withdrawal but had been
stonewalled. He said those requests involved information about the evacuation
and resettlement of Afghan nationals as well as ongoing humanitarian aid and
questions about whether that assistance might be transferred to the Taliban.

“It sounds like you’re a Republican member of Congress because Republican
members of Congress send letters over to the administration and we don’t get
answers either,” Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., told Sopko during his testimony.

Despite the so-called stonewalling, Sopko said that he and his agents have been
able to compile interviews with around 800 current and former U.S. employees who
were involved both in the war in Afghanistan and the withdrawal.

“I think we had more sources in Afghanistan than all the other IGs combined and
the GAO. So we’re still trying to get that information, but the best
information, like actual contract data, and actually the names of people is best
and it should by law come from State and AID,” Sopko said.

Show Full Article
Related Topics: Military Headlines Taliban Afghanistan Global Hot Spots Congress
© Copyright 2023 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be
published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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