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USAID’s Taliban Money Laundering Scheme
Bags of hundred dollar bills traded through a terrorist bank.
February 13, 2025 by Daniel Greenfield 1 CommentNewsletter
In 2022, the DA 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.
When the State Department and USAID claimed that they “do not provide assistance to or through the Taliban” but work “with trusted international partners with extensive experience working in challenging environments like Afghanistan”, it was a half-truth at best.
The “trusted international partners” included the UN. USAID funded the UN which used an intermediary to purchase the hundred dollar bills from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where Afghanistan’s wealth, claimed by the Taliban, was being held, then contracted with a company, quite possiblyOsama bin Laden’s old airline, to fly it to Afghanistan, deposit it in banks, allocate it to NGOs and then use DAB to convert the dollars into local Afghan currency.
This Afghan currency was also provided by the United States which funded the printing of 20 billion in Taliban currency by European companies for which the dollars would be exchanged.
“The United States and our partners have been working hard with international banks to facilitate payment transfers from Afghanistan’s central bank to European printing companies,” State Department spokesman Ned Price had told reporters. “This will address one of the aspects of Afghanistan’s ongoing liquidity crisis, consistent with U.S. efforts to support basic human needs.”
Rather than just the ‘foreign aid’ to Afghanistan in the form of the ‘Afghanis’ that it was already arranging to print for the Taliban, the Biden administration sent dollars to them through the UN.
Under the guise of humanitarian needs, $1.7 billion was provided to the UN, which used some of the money to buy dollars to fly into Afghanistan, to trade for Afghan currency, which the U.S. had also arranged to have printed on behalf of the Taliban. The exchange left the Taliban’s DAB terrorist bank with large amounts of U.S. currency that it could auction off to its own allies.
The arrangement is even worse than it sounds because DAB artificially set the exchange rate of the Afghani to the dollar at a far higher rate than the black market exchange rate. And the Taliban bank used the auctions of the dollars to artificially prop up that exchange rate.
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 its rupee struggles against the dollar.
During the intermediate step, DAB held ‘auctions’ of the dollars which elements linked to the Taliban, including the Haqqani network allied with Al Qaeda, reportedly ‘win’. The auctions prop up the Afghani currency and keep the Taliban in power. And the Taliban take their share at each step of the process, taxing all the various intermediaries before finally cashing out the money.
Sending dollars to Afghanistan only to exchange them for Afghanis which the United States was also arranging for served absolutely no purpose except to give the Taliban liquid currency, but was justified as a way to prop up the Afghani currency as a “humanitarian aid” measure.
The money laundering operation required multiple steps and plausible deniability for USAID, the State Department and the UN which insisted that “[n]one of the cash brought into Afghanistan is deposited in the Central Bank of Afghanistan nor provided to the Taliban de facto authorities by the UN.” To the extent this was true, it was because the money was deposited in a “private bank”, allocated to NGOs funded by the UN which then exchanged it with DBA’s assets.
USAID was able to claim plausible deniability because it was putting money into pooled UN accounts, which a report by the SIGAR Afghanistan War government watchdog revealed, “prevents tying humanitarian assistance expenses—including for the purchase and transport of cash into Afghanistan—to a specific donor’s contribution.
Putting the money into UN pooled accounts allowed USAID to claim that they “do not provide assistance to or through the Taliban”, they just put money into “pooled UN accounts” which they do not control, and “as a result, State and USAID do not know how much of their total contributions to the UN have been used to purchase cash for use in Afghanistan”.
The UN deposits the dollars into its accounts in a conveniently unnamed ‘private bank’ in Afghanistan. Its name is surely known to the Taliban authorities, but continues to be unknown to United States officials. From there the money is distributed to the bank accounts of the NGOs funded by the UN. At that point they are most likely converted into Afghanis with DAB’s aid since the supply of the Taliban currency is controlled by Afghanistan’s central bank.
That allows the UN to claim that “[n]one of the cash brought into Afghanistan is deposited in the Central Bank of Afghanistan nor provided to the Taliban de facto authorities by the UN.” The cash is not provided to the Taliban or DAB by the UN, but by the groups funded by the UN.
The SIGAR report noted that “a UN official told us that the UN’s liability ends when the recipient PIO and NGOs have the funds in their accounts.” The UN then disavows any liability for providing the money to the Taliban even as UN officials are well aware that it’s happening.
The State Department responded to these revelations by falsely claiming that there are no sanctions on Afghanistan, that banks refuse to carry out wire transfers because of “the lack of profitability” and that “to the best of our knowledge, no electronic financial delivery systems are currently scalable to meet the liquidity needs of the UN” requiring it to instead convert billions of dollars into paper notes and ship them by plane. None of this is true or even a plausible lie.
USAID declined to reply to the government watchdog’s report.
The Taliban money laundering scheme was not an exception, it was how USAID, the State Department and the UN have operated for too long, not only in Afghanistan, but in Syria, Yemen, Gaza and many other terrorist areas around the world, using plausible deniability and chains of organizations to avoid accountability and direct responsibility for aiding terrorists.
Americans have become the financiers of their worst enemies. It’s time for that to stop.
