President Joe Biden’s administration announced plans to send more than $300 million in aid to the people of Afghanistan on Tuesday.
National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne clarified in a statement that the money “will directly flow through independent humanitarian organizations,” to avoid assisting the Taliban. The aid aims to provide assistance for healthcare, hygiene, hunger and cold weather, according to the White House. (RELATED: ‘That Didn’t Happen Just Once’: Gold Star Fathers Allege That Biden Looked Down At His Watch When All Fallen Service Members Came Home)
“The United States is announcing a new contribution of more than $308 million in humanitarian assistance for the people of Afghanistan,” Horne said in a statement provided to the Daily Caller. “This brings total U.S. humanitarian aid in Afghanistan and for Afghan refugees in the region to nearly $782 million since October 2021, and we remain the single largest donor of humanitarian aid in Afghanistan.”
DULLES, VIRGINIA – AUGUST 31: Refugees board a bus at Dulles International Airport that will take them to a refugee processing center after being evacuated from Kabul following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan on August 31, 2021 in Dulles, Virginia. The Department of Defense announced yesterday that the U.S. military had completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan, ending 20 years of war. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The U.S. is also providing Afghanistan with 1 million additional COVID-19 vaccine doses, bringing the total dose donation to 4.3 million since Biden entered office. Biden has faced heavy criticism for his handling of the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan late last summer.
Biden vowed that the withdrawal would be “safe and orderly,” but the event turned out to be deadly and chaotic, with more than a dozen U.S. Marines being killed in a bombing while protecting the Kabul airport. The administration also abandoned hundreds of U.S. citizens and tens of thousands of Afghan allies in the country.
Taliban forces overthrew the U.S.-backed Afghan government in less than a month this summer, far outpacing the Biden administration’s predictions. Biden attempted to claim in the aftermath that no one could have predicted the Afghan government could fall so quickly, despite reports that the U.S. intelligence community warned him of exactly that.
“[U.S.] leaders were told by the military it would take no time at all for the Taliban to take everything,” an anonymous U.S. intelligence official told ABC News at the time. “No one listened.”
“The intelligence community assessment has always been accurate; they just disregarded it,” the official reportedly added, speaking about the Biden administration.