[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]

An earthquake hit Afghanistan. The Taliban are claiming 800 dead and thousands injured. The Europeans and other countries are promising to send aid.

And the United States of America should refuse to join them.

Casualty numbers coming out of the Taliban are as worthless as those coming from Hamas in Gaza or the Houthis in Yemen. Terrorists always lie, trying to make us feel sorry and guilty, just before they try to kill us. And the nonprofits, including the UN, that work in those areas are rotten with terrorists and their useful idiots, and should never be believed about anything.

But even if half of Afghanistan were dead or dying, we should not send a single penny because none of the aid will go to earthquake victims, no more than the food sent to Gaza or Yemen went to regular people, it will go to the terrorists who use it to fund their Islamic terror state.

And a generation after 9/11, the Taliban are not only back in power, but they are harboring Al Qaeda and any money we send can be used to harbor the terrorists who continue to kill us.

The latest SIGAR (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction) report documented that the Taliban, like Islamic terrorists everywhere, divert aid, tax nonprofits, force them to hire their own terrorists as employees and use the aid we send as an asset.

The Taliban don’t care about their own people, that’s why they used them as human shields when fighting us, it’s why they use them as human shields now because they know we care. The sight of a crying child in Afghanistan, Yemen, Gaza or anywhere in the world touches us.

But to our enemies, it’s just another weapon.

Our efforts to rebuild Afghanistan paradoxically financed the Taliban’s comeback. The more we tried to send food, open schools and build wells, the more money flowed to the Taliban. While our idiot politicians and generals insisted that we could “win the hearts and minds” of the Afghans by showering them with aid, the Taliban took that aid and bought themselves an army.

We tried to “win hearts and minds”. The Taliban won the war. And got all the bodies.

After Afghanistan fell, we should have learned a lesson, but as Freedom Center Investigates documented, the Biden administration sent $3.7 billion  to Afghanistan after the takeover.

Biden stole money from 9/11 victims for the Taliban, he arranged to print currency for the Taliban, booked seats on Osama’s old airline and enabled the shipment of billions in hundred dollar bills via the United Nations. No Saudi billionaire was half as clever at financing Islamic terrorists as the Obama and the Biden administrations were at abusing taxpayer money.

Since Trump took office, the Taliban have been struggling. They were even desperate enough to go to a global warming conference to ask for money. The earthquake may be catastrophic for the ordinary Afghans affected by it, but it’s a blessing for the Taliban who will now be able to cash in on aid from the European Union, Japan and anyone stupid enough to send help.

America is the motherlode. Our politicians dispense foreign aid on a scale no one else can. We were the gushing well that the UN and dozens of ‘humanitarian groups’ used as the pipeline to aid terrorists worldwide. President Trump and DOGE began putting a stop to it. And that’s good.

Sending aid to enemy nations doesn’t help: it makes things much worse every single time.

When the Communists took over the Soviet Union and a famine broke out, they might have lost power, but the United States organized a massive famine relief effort, which, at least under Hoover was intended to keep Communists out of the loop, but under FDR no longer did, and the result was that the Communists remained in power for generations leading to millions dead and a Cold War that might have climaxed in a nuclear war that could have destroyed America.

After Mao’s Great Famine in China, it was Canada’s turn to bail out the Communist dictatorship with massive shipments of wheat even as the PRC was sending its ‘foreign aid’ to Cuba. The end result was that the People’s Republic of China survived, industrialized and became a grave threat to the free world. That may yet lead to a devastating world war or the fall of the West.

Our insistence on aiding the Muslim world made it wealthy enough to finance terrorism and spread the influence of its violent and hateful doctrines to our own nations and cities. After a generation of failed foreign policy operations in which we could literally track how our aid went into the hands of terrorists, there are plenty of politicians and professional humanitarians who are already demanding that we send aid to Afghanistan because surely it will be different now.

These claims are accompanied by outright lies, long since disproven, that the aid doesn’t go to terrorists or benefit terrorists, and that by sending aid we can liberalize the Taliban or undermine their rule. All of this is absolutely false. SIGAR and journalists, including those at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, have long since documented how the Taliban appropriates aid.

Sending aid will not ‘liberalize’ the Taliban. The Taliban initially pretended to be more moderate in the hopes of extracting more aid from us. When they saw that it wasn’t coming, they stopped pretending and began publicly lashing women, but we should not confuse this deception with any meaningful change in the nature of the Islamic supremacist regime that runs Afghanistan.

The Taliban tell us what they think will make us give them money. It doesn’t reflect either their actual nature or the reality on the ground. What we know about Afghanistan comes from the Taliban and from employees of ‘humanitarian groups’ who are also members of the Taliban.

These ‘UN Taliban’ brief western supervisors who then relay this information in quotes to the media. This method of whitewashing terrorist propaganda is also routinely used in Gaza. By putting westerners, especially women, from groups like the UN or the Red Cross out front, viewers believe that they’re relaying their own experiences, when in reality they’re usually nowhere near the affected areas, they’re closely supervised by the terrorists when they do travel, and they are handfed reports by their ‘employees’ who actually work for the Taliban.

Finally, sending aid will not only not undermine Taliban rule, it will secure it because the Islamic supremacist regime will use that aid to help its own supporters, and to bribe clans and groups into supporting it. The Communist regimes in Russia and China pretended that the western food was actually coming from their own agricultural projects and proved the power of Communism.

We did not discredit Communism by providing aid to Communists and we won’t discredit Islam by providing aid to Islamists. If we want to defeat our enemies, one elementary place to start is by not sending them aid no matter how much they whine, wail or guilt trip us. Guilt is the great industry of the postmodern West. It’s also the religion of those with no religions.

But sending aid to Afghanistan is not merciful to those living there or to us. Afghanistan’s best hope and our best interest is that the Jihadists running it should fall. The Taliban’s best hope and interest is that we send them ‘humanitarian aid’ that they use to fund their terrorist regime.

We tried defeating them with aid, but the best hope of beating them is to end all aid.