The Biggest Lie Being Told About Afghanistan

A coalition of bad-faith actors are pushing a big lie about where taxpayer money is going

As we near the 3-year anniversary of the Taliban’s takeover, Afghanistan remains one of the most depressing places to write about on the planet. As I write this:

• Girls are mostly banned from public education and gender apartheid is instilled throughout the country

• Roughly 20+ million people are suffering from food insecurity and 17+ million rely on food assistance

• Pakistan is carrying out mass-scale deportations of Afghan nationals back to Afghanistan

• The Taliban is extending its brutality and reign, which includes raping Afghan women that are being detained extrajudicially

• The U.S. has made seeking asylum and refuge much harder

• Afghanistan remains deeply sanctioned with its central bank assets frozen, deepening an economic crisis

Afghans are suffering from this multitude of crises, all of which are intertwined. All of this is also happening in wake of 20-years of American-led intervention as well as forty years of American foreign policy in Afghanistan.

And yet, a coalition of bad-faith actors are pushing a big lie about aid that the U.S. sending to an impoverished and brutalized Afghan population. In the past three years, the American right-wing and corrupt Afghan elites and alleged war criminals have pushed a false narrative that American taxpayer money is, somehow, funding the Taliban. This is not only false, but seems to be part of a right-wing disinformation campaign meant to build political pressure to end any and all aid to the Afghan people. Setting aside the fact essentially funding a group like the Taliban that would be a huge political scandal for any administration, this is simply a bold and lie—one that has picked up steam in recent weeks. Even Project 2025, the fascist right-wing dream playbook created for a future Trump presidency, recommends ending humanitarian aid to countries, including to Afghanistan.

Since the summer of 2023, the U.S. has sent almost $3 billion in aid to the Afghan people, a critical piece of action by the U.S. government that has contributed to saving countless saves. A recent Special Inspector General Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) report recently outlined how about $10.9 million has in fact fallen into the hands of the Taliban, inadvertently and indirectly. These are overwhelmingly local taxes paid by local Afghan nationals. Considering how the Taliban is in control of every institution and facet of the country, that seems hard to avoid—but we should if we can. The lie, however, about the $239 million was so outrageous and politically motivated that SIGAR recently tweeted that it was wrong. One son of a former warlord recently said on a podcast that $17 billion in American funds have gone to the Taliban. He goes on to say he has no evidence of that, but that what he’s “hearing.”

That’s compared to the actual $7 billion in military equipment the U.S. left in the hands of the Taliban in the wake of its 2021 withdrawal. Read below to see the State Department’s response to the taxes bit, which is paid by local Afghans — not the U.S.

It’s, obviously, vitally important that any and all taxpayer money goes the right beneficiaries, the Afghan people. There are, for example, cash assistance programs that empower local Afghans and build resilience in local Afghan communities. And while there are some who have raised legitimate concerns around assistance to the Afghan people — for example, aid divergence — they lose any and all legitimacy when corrupt Afghan elites and war criminals align themselves with the far right-wing fascist politicians who are calling for mass deportations of Afghans and other vulnerable immigrant communities. Those pushing bold lies about where U.S. taxpayer money is going are contributing to future policies that are going to kill many, many Afghans.