It couldn’t have been much fun being Secretary of State Antony Blinken Wednesday. First, he was eviscerated in a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting by Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) over the disastrous U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan—for which finally Blinken expressed regret—but then he was grilled by Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) over the estimated “tens of billions” of U.S. taxpayer dollars he says the Biden-Harris regime has been funneling to the Taliban.
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Mast, who was elected Tuesday to become the new chair of the Foreign Relations Committee in January, asked if Blinken had even been to Afghanistan since America’s 2021 ill-fated pullout, which left 13 American servicemen dead from an ISIS suicide bomb. Blinken admitted he had not, and that we are not in control of the U.S. embassy there.
Then Mast drilled down:
“There’s an American citizen out there, literally woke up this morning losing 30% of their paycheck. And a good percentage of that is going to the Taliban or other programs abroad,” Mast said. “And this is something that we all need to think about, and we will be thinking about deeply for the next two years. There’s a joke that’s made often out there about kids going to college to learn basket weaving, and what a joke that would be. But the United States right now is literally sending tens of millions of dollars to the Taliban. 14.9 million, to be exact, to teach Afghans how to do carpet weaving.”
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But Mast wasn’t done:
“We are giving $280 million to the United Nations to do cash transfers for food in Afghanistan,” Mast continued. “Yet we’re not sending an ear of corn from Iowa, a sack of potatoes from Idaho, or a cucumber or an orange from Florida. And that discounts the fact that there’s no American tonnage going through our ports to send those things out of here, either. It’s just cash transfers.”
Mast had plenty more to say, including asking why the heck we would send $75 million to teach Afghan women to become farmers. “I don’t believe that we spend $30 million in the United States of America to teach women to be farmers,” he pointed out. He also wanted an explanation for the $3.5 billion that was transferred to the Afghan fund “that is tended to protect the macro financial stability on behalf of the Afghan people.”
“What the hell does that mean? Can you tell me? I don’t know, that’s a bunch of gibberish to me,” Mast demanded.
Blinken’s response was predictably weak:
In response, Blinken said he respectfully disagreed with Mast’s opposition to the Afghan funds, saying, “The workwe have done through these partners, and many other countries have done, has saved many, many lives in an incredibly difficult situation.”
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Mast has some great points here, and one wonders why we are sending billions to a regime that treats women as sub-humans when we have plenty of pressing needs in our own country.
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We can hope Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, will delve into this problem and make sure our hard-earned tax dollars aren’t being thrown around to teach carpet weaving in far-off countries that have no love for us.