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SIGAR 60th Quarterly Report to Congress [1]

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Date: 2023-07-30  

USIP Report Says Taliban View UN Assistance as “Revenue Stream”

This quarter, an analysis prepared by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) for USAID found that the Taliban are “pushing for ever-increasing degrees of credit and control over the delivery of aid,” particularly aid from the UN, since most donor funding is routed through the UN system. USIP reported, “According to multiple UN officials across different agencies, the Taliban have effectively infiltrated and influenced most UN-managed assistance programming.” The Taliban move to control foreign assistance is one facet of an intensive strategy to consolidate power under their supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada, suppress external criticism and dissent, and co-opt internal stakeholders and constituencies. USIP characterizes the Taliban’s approach as a pursuit of “an exclusive monopoly over state power and many other avenues of authority, including economic activity and social engineering.”

USIP said the UN has navigated a complex, and increasingly restrictive, dynamic with the Taliban since the group took power. Humanitarian organizations have faced an ethical dilemma in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, recognizing that withdrawal of aid due to the Taliban’s restrictive governance would leave millions of Afghans without life-saving resources. At the same time, Taliban intentions have often been opaque. Since 2019, the Taliban had “broadcast a range of public statements, diplomacy, and informal activity designed to suggest they were open to measures of political inclusivity.”

According to the report, the UN’s sentiment following the takeover was that the Taliban just needed to “find their footing.” A senior UN official for Afghanistan, Markus Potzel, told the UN Security Council in September 2022 that Afghanistan’s future depended on engagement with the Taliban. At the time, Potzel called the international community’s relationship with the Taliban “pragmatic,” but in the months since, the Taliban have “increasingly suppressed” Afghanistan’s pluralistic civil society and “undertaken a sweeping range of initiatives” to transition from an insurgency to an authoritarian state. These measures include broad restrictions on women’s rights, which fundamentally conflict with the UN’s founding principles. As the Taliban cement their authoritarian rule, foreign aid organizations are faced with “a steadily increasing trend of interference.” Yet, donors continue to fund UN operations given the level of need in the country.

An Afghan potter displays a clay pot inside his shop in Kabul in July 2023. (AFP photo by Wakil Kohsar)

According to USIP, the Taliban are “moving toward sweeping suppression of external criticism and dissent,” achieved through intimidation and violence. The Taliban operate under the assumption that “the threat of force and raw power can compel any desirable outcome.” This is exemplified by the Taliban approach to foreign NGOs in Afghanistan. The Taliban will “accept foreign funded and provided goods and services as long as they are delivered in a suitably low-profile, apolitical fashion, and with immediate tangible benefit.” Any sign of political dissent is met with the threat of force. USIP argues that “This trend has been accompanied by the Taliban’s growing tendency to attempt to increasingly control delivery,” through monitoring, restricting access, and controlling organization operations. The Taliban have also sought to consolidate control over the former government ministry offices that oversee foreign aid, development, and international funding. The UN reported that many civil servants in these offices were dismissed and replaced by Taliban loyalists 8–10 months after the Taliban seized power. With this turnover came a “wave of increasing encroachment by certain offices into the practices of aid organizations—perhaps most notably in the emerging requirement for NGOs and agencies to sign restrictive/invasive MOUs.”

The Taliban encroachment into NGO activity is primarily experienced at the local level between the Taliban and humanitarian implementing partners, wherein district and provincial officials agree to operating conditions in exchange for control, credit, and material benefits. The lack of official guidance on civil governance at the district and provincial levels “has sustained a great degree of regional variation in Taliban ‘policies’ or community relations.” This dynamic of continuing operations under limiting conditions primarily applies to NGOs, whereas civil society organizations (CSOs), such as local women’s non-profits, face much greater scrutiny. USIP reports that “one key factor in [this] dynamic may be the intangibility of the benefits of CSO programming; the more concrete an organization’s deliverables are, the more appealing.”

The Taliban’s interference into NGO activities leaves humanitarian workers incredibly vulnerable. “Any form of humanitarian or development assistance is prone to manipulation by the Taliban. Aid/development delivery largely relies on national staff in field locations, which exposes them to Taliban coercion with little leverage or recourse to resist,” USIP reported. This exposure is heightened by the lack of legal recourse for NGOs and their employees in Afghanistan. The Taliban have not adopted a formal constitution, nor is there “any real form of written legal code.” Law is instead understood through the individual religious jurisprudence of the judiciary, which may or may not be independent from other power structures, according to USIP. As a result, the law is inaccessible to anyone outside the Taliban.

In addition to controlling NGO activities on the ground, the Taliban are attempting to control the narrative in Afghanistan by seeking to win credit for the aid delivered, possibly due to their understanding that the economy is “growing very slowly” and “future revenue growth may be weak,” limiting funds for Taliban-driven civil society spending. USIP describes the Taliban’s stance as one of “pragmatic opportunism,” accepting NGOs that provide the most “perceived utility.” However, this does not dispel the concurrent “sense of suspicion, even hostility” felt by the Taliban; instead, animosity toward foreign-funded aid is increasingly encouraged by Taliban leadership. USIP notes that historically, “the more comfortable [the Taliban] grew in any given area, the less tentative they proved to be when it came to asserting their authority over NGO operations and most other aspects of society.”

A farmer works a field in Bamyan Province near the remnants of a Buddha statue destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

The UN’s continuing deference to the Taliban, the intimidation and coercion of local UN staff, the lack of singular UN policy/collective bargaining power, and a limited understanding of the security environment has made the UN vulnerable to Taliban influence, USIP reported. Furthermore, the failure to create a national-level donor strategy for engagement with the Taliban has allowed the regime to shape restrictive boundaries of such engagement, such as crafting a “Code of Conduct” for NGOs and foreign organizations, and forcing humanitarian assistance partners to sign MOUs with Taliban line ministries and Taliban intelligence services. According to USIP, the Taliban-UN relationship “may be summarized through the understanding that the Taliban appear to view the UN system as yet another revenue stream, one which their movement will seek to monopolize and centralize control over.” USIP suggests this UN “revenue stream” is especially attractive due to the widespread “means of profiting from engagement with the UN,” none of which (outside of taxation) are official sources of government revenue owed to Taliban leadership.

Inspector General John Sopko raised the issue of Taliban access to foreign aid in testimony to the House Oversight and Accountability Committee on April 19, 2023, warning that SIGAR could not guarantee that U.S. funding intended for impoverished Afghans was not falling into the hands of the Taliban. SIGAR also warned in its 2023 High-Risk List about increasing Taliban interference with UN and NGO activities, and the Taliban’s access to international funds through various direct and indirect customs charges, taxes, and fees.

Moreover, at the time of IG Sopko’s April testimony, SIGAR had already received numerous allegations of Taliban diversion and inadequate protection of humanitarian assistance programs. Unfortunately, these concerns were dramatically confirmed by almost every person SIGAR interviewed in London who had access to information from people working or living in Afghanistan.

As the UN seeks to raise $3.2 billion for humanitarian assistance in 2023, it is necessary to provide vigilant oversight to ensure that the money actually goes towards helping the Afghan people, rather than to empowering the Taliban. SIGAR has a performance audit and a lessons-learned report underway assessing the provision and oversight of humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan and the Taliban’s access to these resources.

The assertions in the USIP report are supported by this ongoing work, including work responding to a March 13, 2023, request from the Chair of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs.

SIGAR’s Lessons Learned Program is focusing on the challenges faced by donors, the UN, and NGOs in trying to get aid to the most vulnerable populations while bypassing politically estranged regimes, like the Taliban. The report will compare the current challenges to aid delivery in Afghanistan to other especially difficult contexts, like Sudan and Syria. While this research is ongoing, SIGAR has heard allegations from dozens of interviewees that diversion of aid and interference into aid delivery by such regimes is common. The report will make recommendations

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[1] Url: https://www.sigar.mil/interactive-reports/sigar-quarterly-report-2023-07-30/

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