Edit: not to "mention" humanitarian aid.

#usaid #foreignassistance #ukraine

"If we are to continue providing #taxpayer dollars to these organizations, it must be made conditional on U.S. oversight agencies having full access to their projects and records to make sure funding reaches the people it is intended to help."

"Today, most aid to Afghanistan and other war-torn countries flows through United Nations #UN offices that my agency has identified as having weak oversight. "

"U.S.-funded partners paid at least $10.9 million in taxes and fees to [the] Taliban ... Two out of five State Department bureaus were unable to show that their contractors working in Afghanistan in 2022 had been vetted sufficiently to ensure their work was not benefiting terrorist organizations."

"Since 2021 the United States has funneled $3.3 billion to Afghanistan through public international organizations, mainly United Nations offices, for humanitarian purposes. Some of this money helps the Afghan people, and some goes to the Taliban."

"President Dwight Eisenhower once warned of the growing influence of a ' #militaryindustrialcomplex.' Today, there are multiple complexes: #development and #humanitarian assistance, #anti-corruption and #transparency, protection for women and marginalized people, and many others."

"Important information for measuring the success of initiatives was — at times deliberately — hidden from Congress and the American public, including USAID-funded assessments that concluded Afghan ministries were incapable of managing direct U.S. financial assistance."

"Official statements across successive U.S. presidential administrations were, in my view, often simply untrue."

"The fall of Kunduz in 2015 ... should have punctured the delusion that Afghan forces could hold their own. But building those forces had been the cornerstone of the U.S. reconstruction effort, whose success would pave the way for eventual U.S. withdrawal. The rosy narrative had to be maintained."

"Yet over two decades — and even as Afghan provinces fell like dominoes in the summer of 2021 — I do not recall any senior official telling Congress or the American people that failure was a real possibility."

"As one former U.S. military adviser told my office, the entire system became a self-licking ice cream cone: More money was always being spent to justify previous spending. Old staff departed, new staff arrived with “better” ideas, and new iterations of the same old solutions were repeated..."