Jalil Afridi
Washington DC: After years of asking questions by The Frontier Post about the corruption by Afghan officials during former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, the U.S. State Department Spokesperson, Matthew Miller finally acknowledged that former Afghan official Mir Rehman Rehmani and his son Ajmal Rehmani have been sanctioned by the U.S. treasury department.
Mr Mir Rehman Rehmani was Speaker of the Afghan House of the People and a well known businessman. There are 44 other entities which have also been sanctioned due to their association with Mr Rehmani.
Miss Nazira Karimi, a senior Afghan journalist while asking the question especially mentioned this scribe for raising this issue for several years.
It has been widely reported by several others news media outlets as well that Afghan officials were involved in transnational crimes, looting the American government.
The sad part of the whole story is that the Afghan officials were taking money from the U.S. to help out other poor Afghans, but instead that money was landing in countries like UAE, UK, US, Canada, Turkey and the off shore companies in Bahamas.
For years, The Frontier Post was raising this issue at U.S. State Department and with former Afghan Ambassador to the U.S., Hamdullah Mohib that the aid mentioned by the U.S. is not reaching the hands of the poor. It is pertinent to mention that top U.S. media outlets have now reported that Hamdullah Mohib himself owns several properties in the U.S. and around the world. Mohib was among those individuals who flew out of Afghanistan in helicopter with former President Ashraf Ghani as his National Security Advisor and his cash boy.
It is also important to bring on record that there were several projects even in Kabul where several millions of U.S. tax payers were allocated for a project, but sadly the project did not even exist in first place.
Another reality related to this story is that it is not only Afghan nationals who were involved in this saga of corruption, but Afghan Americans and American contractors and big U.S. defence companies were also minting from that ocean of dollars which was flowing in Afghanistan for twenty years.
An employee of one of one of the top US defence company in Arlington told this scribe on the condition of anonymity that “at that time we would give contract not to the lowest bidding company but to the highest bidding company.”
