Democrats Want to Turn Afghanistan Into America’s Palestine
“It is the duty of the world, especially the US…to come and rebuild the Afghan economy.”
By Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center specializing in investigative reporting on the Left and Islamic terrorism.
The Biden administration could pull the troops out of Afghanistan, but the actual withdrawal will never end. After bringing over some 50,000 Afghan evacuees, most of whom had no visas, there are another estimated 62,000 Afghans waiting on visas to come to America.
That’s over 110,000 Afghan immigrants coming to America and we’re just getting started.
In July, I wrote an article headlined, “‘Saving Afghan Interpreters’ is a Scam That Would Bring 100,000 Afghans to U.S.” We’re already on track to break the 100,000 barrier in 2022.
But even as Biden is rushing every Afghan he can find to America, taxpayers are sending $144 million in “humanitarian aid” to Afghanistan so the Taliban don’t have to divert any of the money they gain from the opium trade and taxing our “humanitarian aid” to caring for their own people.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai of the Taliban recently asserted that, “It is the duty of the world, especially the US… to come and rebuild the Afghan economy.”
The Taliban control the country, but they want us to still keep on pumping billions into it.
The Jihadists are cheerfully duplicating the same arrangement that Hamas has in Gaza or the Houthis have in Yemen in which they get to focus on fighting us while we take care of their people. The terrorists get the geopolitical and financial benefits of controlling a country while Americans get to do the hard work of providing basic services to the people trying to kill us.
But if the Democrats have their way, Afghanistan will indeed become America’s Palestine.
A recent congressional letter to the Biden administration signed by Rep. Adam Schiff, Rep. Karen Bass, Rep. Ted Lieu, and Rep. Joaquin Castro, among others, proposes using Afghan assets held by the U.S. to fund Afghan schools and “hold the Taliban-led government to their commitment to allow girls and young women to attend secondary school nationwide.”
Then the Biden administration “should assist multilateral organizations attempting to pay Afghan civil servants” which amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the bureaucracy of a terrorist state.
Finally, “the Biden administration should allow international financial institutions to inject the necessary economic capital into Afghanistan to stave off the worst of its economic meltdown” and “facilitate dollar auctions” through an Afghan bank.
If these measures were actually implemented, the United States would still be funding and running much of Afghanistan’s economic and public service infrastructure remotely even while the Taliban actually control the country. The best way to describe the insane proposition is to say that it would turn Afghanistan into America’s very own private little “Palestine”.
Like the PLO and Hamas, the Taliban would have their own territory and would focus on terrorism, while the international community, led by the United States would fund their schools, run their official economy, and provide most social services through the UN and various NGOs.
Afghanistan would literally become our very own Gaza. The Taliban would function as the Palestinian Authority, the “moderate” terrorists we deal with, while ISIS-K would play the role of Hamas, the “extremist” terrorists we want to stop by giving money to the “moderate” terrorists.
And we would be spending hundreds of millions on social welfare to stop “radicalization”.
That may be exactly what the Taliban want. The Jihadists would get the best of both worlds. There would be an “inclusive” front government” made up of the few factions tolerated by the Taliban, including even a few women in burkas, with experience in navigating NGO slang.
They would tell the State Department whatever it wants to hear about educating girls, religious tolerance, and democracy, as long as we keep sending them hundreds of millions of dollars.
Meanwhile a Taliban shadow government would actually run things to their own liking, taking credit for all the social services and humanitarian aid provided by the United States while finding new ways to profit from it the way that it did back when the Taliban were an insurgency.
The congressional proposal is full of promises that the money won’t fall into the hands of the Taliban. Insisting that you can pay Afghan civil servants, fund schools, and inject massive amounts of capital into the country without any of it falling into the hands of the government is a dumb lie. The Taliban had an extensive taxation infrastructure which extracted money from the UN even when it was a terrorist insurgency, the idea that it won’t see any money from aid, salaries, and economic development capital when it’s in charge is entirely impossible.
But, as with the PLO and Hamas, the game here is plausible deniability for funding terrorists.
Democrats (and some Republicans) want to turn Afghanistan into another Palestine, a broken society run by terrorists, in a permanent state of humanitarian crisis that we are personally responsible for. Withdrawing from Afghanistan was not about actually getting out of the country, but letting the Taliban take over so that America is on the hook financially, but with no control.
Every year, we’ll hear about the coming famine in Afghanistan and we’ll chip in another few hundred million to feed the people while the Taliban builds its war chest. Just as Biden is doing this year. Americans will still fund Afghanistan’s government, but it will answer to the Taliban. Americans will fund Afghanistan’s schools, but they’ll teach Jihad and hatred of America.
And every time there’s a problem in Afghanistan, it’ll be our fault for not giving them enough.
Meanwhile, Islamic terrorists will set up shop in Afghanistan and stage attacks against America. The Taliban will, as they did with the Kabul airport bombing that killed 13 of our service members, disavow responsibility and then claim that people are joining ISIS-K because we haven’t sent them enough “humanitarian aid” to spend on social services for the terrorists.
And then Afghanistan really will be our own Palestine.
Withdrawing from Afghanistan was supposed to recalculate our national interests, instead it’s sucking us deeper into the Afghan swamp. It’s time to step back and think about what we want, not for Afghanistan, but for ourselves.
“No one benefits from a failed state in Afghanistan,” the congressional letter falsely claims.
That’s not true.
The Taliban’s failure is good for America. Afghanistan will always be a hellhole beloved by Islamic terrorists, and its people will always want to come to America and Europe. No amount of money we spend on aid will change that. If two decades and trillions spent on Afghanistan have taught us nothing else, they should have taught us the folly of trying to change this basic reality.
It’s in America’s national interest for the Taliban, who aside from being our enemies, are also the catspaws of Pakistan and Communist China, to fail as much as possible and to be diverted from anything other than trying to maintain their grip on Afghanistan. The worse things get in Afghanistan, the more Afghans will do what they should have done all along and oppose them.
American aid helps the Taliban even if it does nothing more than relieve the inevitable misery.
The last thing we should be doing is helping the Taliban hold on to power and discouraging opposition to their regime by making life comfortable for the Afghans who welcomed their rule. What we should do to the Taliban is exactly what we did to Soviet allies during the Cold War by undermining them at every turn. Instead we’re subsidizing Al Qaeda and China’s allies.
And if the Democrats have their way, America will be permanently tethered to Afghanistan. The forever war will become a forever administration in which we will fund the Taliban’s schools, pay their bureaucrats, and feed and care for their people for generations with no end in sight.
If not forever.
Biden sacrificed 13 American lives, abandoned Americans behind enemy lines, and allowed the Taliban to humiliate us in front of the world in order to withdraw from Afghanistan. Let’s make that botched withdrawal count and actually withdraw financially and politically from Afghanistan.