Thread by @JeffRigsby2

"60 Minutes" just aired a long segment on School of Leadership-Afghanistan (SOLA): the country's only boarding school for girls, which evacuated 𝘦𝘯 𝘮𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘦 to Rwanda in August 2021.

It's a gripping story. But some facts have been left out.

(1/60)

cbsnews.com/news/sola-afgh…

@LesleyStahl went to Kigali to see the school and meet its founder, Shabana Basij-Rasikh. So I can't fault "60 Minutes" for the depth of its reporting.

But there are things you can learn about SOLA only by being in Kabul. There are also things you can learn from research online.

Some of that research has been time-consuming, to put it mildly.

But Stahl could have started with a close reading of SOLA's website: sola-afghanistan.org

That's because in February 2022, Basij-Rasikh posted something so inexplicable that it led me down a deep rabbit hole.

Six months after the fall of Kabul, she announced that SOLA would expand its operations by enrolling a new incoming class—"as many as 50 girls"—and bringing them to Kigali.

But they would only accept new students from among refugee and diaspora Afghans.

sola-afghanistan.org/shabanas-blog/…

"I wish, so much, that we could recruit girls from within Afghanistan this year. We simply can’t, for obvious reasons."

In September, before I became Twitter-famous, I said that didn't make sense.

There's no reason they can't let girls apply from here.

https://twitter.com/JeffRigsby2/status/1566090110625386498

It didn't look as if money was any constraint.

School of Leadership-Afghanistan Inc. is a US-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so it has to release its finances once a year in an IRS document called "Form 990".

As of 31 December 2020, it had assets of over $10 million (see page 3).

In September, I had no way to know how much more they'd collected in 2021. The Form 990 for that year hadn't been filed.

SOLA's evacuation to Rwanda was very well publicized, including on CNN. Surely that must have motivated quite a few people to donate?

edition.cnn.com/2021/08/25/afr…

But even $10 million should have been enough to deal with the special challenges of recruiting students from inside Afghanistan.

If SOLA had needed to keep its Kabul office open, or buy a round-trip ticket to Dubai for every new student's 𝘮𝘢𝘩𝘳𝘢𝘮, that could have been done.

Remember: the news that girls' secondary schools would stay closed after the winter break came in March 2022, after Basij-Rasikh's post.

And the Taliban had never said they'd prevent girls from studying abroad, although they have sometimes required a 𝘮𝘢𝘩𝘳𝘢𝘮 at the airport.

So it was hard to see why SOLA had decided that girls in Afghanistan—the only girls on earth with no right to attend public high schools in their own country—should be ineligible to enroll.

But to confirm that it wasn't a money issue, I needed one critical piece of information.

I needed to find out how many pupils SOLA had.

(You'd think the website would mention that.)

This tweet from Basij-Rasikh, nine days after the fall of Kabul, announced that "nearly 250 students, faculty, staff, and family members" had left the country:

https://twitter.com/sbasijrasikh/status/1430074916079120385

But of course they tried to bring the girls' families when they could. How many 𝘴𝘵𝘶𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴 arrived in Kigali for the first overseas semester?

I found the answer in a talk Basij-Rasikh delivered in October 2021 at Middlebury College, her alma mater.

middleburycampus.com/article/2021/1…

The campus newspaper cites her as telling Middlebury's president that the school had had 95 students in Kabul, of whom 92 made it to Rwanda.

But she also revealed something which I don't think is very widely known.

She said 42 of those students wouldn't stay long in Kigali.

They'd been admitted to boarding schools in the US, and at the time of her talk they were preparing to leave.

She didn't say if the schools offered them full scholarships, but I'll be astonished if they didn't.

So they probably no longer represent an ongoing expense for SOLA.

It's too bad they weren't able to place all 92. But couldn't SOLA have asked boarding schools in other countries?

It seems they did. Someone I consider reliable (you know who you are) says a number of the remaining girls went to Canada.

I don't know if any ended up in Europe.

Anyhow the first semester's enrollment in Kigali was quite small: considerably fewer than 50 girls.

An endowment of $10.6 million (plus whatever donations SOLA received during 2021—we'll come to that) could have supported a much larger student body, never mind one of that size.

I think all the girls Lesley Stahl talked to in Kigali must have been from that small remaining group, because Basij-Rasikh announced on Twitter just the other day that the school's first new student had recently arrived:

https://twitter.com/sbasijrasikh/status/1630231488644935681

That raises another question.

This young woman arrived under the auspices of a "continuing partnership" between SOLA and the International Organization for Migration:

https://twitter.com/sbasijrasikh/status/1630231552964849665

But what are the terms of the partnership?

If the girls are registered refugees, IOM will cover their travel costs.

But will it pay their tuition as well?

SOLA's website doesn't say, and I can't find any public announcement by IOM.

But if the new girls are being enrolled with financial support from IOM—to be clear, I have no proof of that—it would put SOLA in an enviable financial position.

They wouldn't need to touch their accumulated funds, except to pay the expenses of the handful of students who arrived in August 2021 and still haven't moved on to Western countries.

Most likely even those costs would be met by new donations, so the endowment would keep growing.

During 2021, in fact, it did just that.

When SOLA's annual Form 990 was released towards the end of 2022, it confirmed my hunch that they'd received a surge of donations in the year they escaped so dramatically from Kabul.

Their assets rose from $10.6 million to $18.5 million.

That's almost seven times their expenses for the year. (Compare the red box to the green box.)

There's no law against charities having big endowments. But one rule of thumb is that they shouldn't exceed two years' operating expenses.

What do they plan to do with all that money?

(They've already decided not to spend it on educating girls from Afghanistan, which is how the donors expected it to be used.)

I don't have an answer to that question, only a further hunch.

But I think there is a plan of some sort.

I think it's been coming together gradually.

And I think the plan mainly involves Rwanda, not Afghanistan.

It's fair to ask if I have any evidence for this.

If I had to defend my hypothesis I'd start with this astonishing correspondence, which took place in September 2022 between myself and SOLA's Chairman, Jim Bullion:

(pages 1-2 above, 3-5 below)

To be clear: nothing in the Form 990 for 2021, when I finally received it, was proof of anything unlawful.

And as it turned out, SOLA had asked for a six-month extension to the usual 15 May deadline, so the form wasn't even available until November.

But I don't think many people reading these emails will come away with the sense that everything happening at SOLA was completely aboveboard.

What is it they don't want people to see?

It might not just be the enormous size of their endowment, which is legal (if embarrassing).

I think Bullion was probably worried about something very peculiar that shows up on a close reading of the Form 990s.

And his withholding the 2021 form wouldn't have helped much, because the 2020 form was available online at propublica.org's Nonprofit Explorer website.

The Schedule R attachment ("Related Organizations and Unrelated Partnerships") for 2020 reveals that SOLA Inc. had a "controlled entity" as defined by US tax law.

It was an Afghan NGO called "Sola For Afghan Girls".

And I doubt anyone outside the organization knew it existed.

The NGO Directorate of Afghanistan's Economy Ministry keeps a full list of registered nonprofits.

When I visited their office in Kabul (just north of Gulbahar Center, across the street from the Foreign Ministry) they were able to pull up "Sola for Afghan Girls" in a few seconds.

You can see its details here at the directorate's website (registration number 5044): ngo.gov.af/publication/Ho…

This gives the date of its establishment as 1399/7/30, which I think works out to 21 October 2020.

That means it existed for just over two months of the calendar year.

So it's strange to see, on the third page of the Schedule R, that SOLA Inc. transferred $1,283,217 to Sola for Afghan Girls in that period.

The Form 990 for 2019 had no Schedule R, because the Afghan subsidiary didn't exist yet. The 501(c)(3) paid the school's expenses directly.

If management decided in October 2020 to set up a local NGO as an intermediary for paying rent, staff salaries and other costs, I don't think that was illegal.

(Although it did make the school's finances totally opaque to anyone who isn't physically present in Kabul, as I am.)

But $1.2 million seems like a lot, because it's ostensibly a transfer for only ten weeks of expenses.

After all, they must have been paying their bills the old way between New Year's Day and late October.

Maybe Bullion thought this was all too complicated for me to understand.

I want to add a digression about Jim Bullion, because he has quite the CV.

I think very few girls' boarding schools have a chairman with his unique breadth of life experience.

He's currently a principal with an investment bank in Hanover, New Hampshire.

focusacquisition.com/team-2/jim-bul…

The nominative determinism is strong here.

And it gets stronger. This bio notes that he "led a Department of Defense organization focused on developing Afghanistan’s economic potential."

That was the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, commonly known as TFBSO.

TFBSO was set up to promote economic reconstruction in Iraq. In 2009 it extended its remit to Afghanistan, where it focused on developing the minerals sector (including oil and gas).

Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Paul Brinkley was its first director.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Task_Forc…

When Brinkley stepped down in June 2011 after a slew of ethical controversies, Jim Bullion replaced him.

Bullion himself seems to remember this differently. His LinkedIn profile gives his start date at TFBSO as March 2012:

linkedin.com/in/jlbullion/

But I think that's incorrect.

Perhaps he wants to gloss over the fact that in August 2011, TFBSO awarded a contract in Sheberghan to build a filling station for vehicles running on compressed natural gas (CNG).

CNG is a popular, clean-burning motor fuel in India and Pakistan, but it isn't widely used here.

The idea was to promote CNG use among Afghan motorists. But it didn't work, partly because retrofitting vehicles for CNG is too expensive for most people.

The filling station cost $43 million to build.

Here's a BBC article showing what it looks like:

bbc.com/news/world-us-…

This contract has been described as one of the worst cases of waste, fraud and abuse in the course of the US war. That's a high bar.

And although Paul Brinkley's tenure at TFBSO was rather sketchy, he can't take the blame here. He left two months before the contract was signed.

Bullion didn't stay long at TFBSO, leaving in February 2014:

foreignpolicy.com/2014/02/10/fps…

That may be why when the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction investigated the filling station contract in 2015, the Defense Department told them they were unable to help.

Everyone involved with the project had left DoD.

Anyone who wants more details about this episode should check out SIGAR's report at sigar.mil/pdf/special%20… .

It's really something, and makes me realize how badly I used my time here during the war.

I could be on an island now.

But enough about Jim Bullion for the moment.

I did eventually get SOLA's Form 990 for 2021. And its Schedule R is even more complex than the one for 2020.

The first page still shows Sola for Afghan Girls (the Afghan NGO) as a controlled entity of SOLA Inc. (the US nonprofit).

The second page shows that a third, Kigali-based entity has now been created: "Sola Ltd."

It's identified as a for-profit company, not a tax-exempt organization. (They call it a "C corporation", an American term, but if it's incorporated in Rwanda that can't be literally true.)

And it's not a direct subsidiary of the US nonprofit. It's identified as a subsidiary of the Afghan NGO, Sola for Afghan Girls.

I don't understand why they set things up this way.

The third page shows that substantial sums were paid out to both entities during calendar 2021.

There's no indication of whether the transfers to Rwanda were made directly or routed via Afghanistan.

In any case, there's a serious problem here.

The regulations of the NGO Directorate require organizations to apply for its permission before opening an Afghan bank account.

Sola for Afghan Girls never did that.

And although the NGO Directorate had a record of its establishment, it never received the mandatory annual reports that should have been filed for calendar years 2020 and 2021.

The people at the Directorate thought I was a little weird.

(It's a common problem. I'm used to it.)

But they started paying attention when I mentioned "Shabana". A lot of people here know who she is.

They were stunned to find that nearly a year before the Taliban took over, she'd begun making undeclared wire transfers to Afghanistan.

They hadn't even known that Sola for Afghan Girls maintained a bank account, at Afghanistan International Bank.

That account has now been frozen, on the Directorate's orders. And the organization itself was dissolved at the end of 2022.

Sola for Afghan Girls no longer exists.

I asked for proof of the organization's status, but this was all I could get. Under Afghanistan's NGO Law, my rights as a non-donor are limited.

(And don't @ me about the dissolution, which would have happened automatically after three consecutive years with no annual reports.)

I have no idea how Rwandan law works, so I don't know what happens to "Sola Ltd." now that its Afghan parent has been dissolved.

It's up to Basij-Rasikh and Bullion to explain why they chose that structure.

More importantly, they should explain what they're now doing in Rwanda.

I was trying to figure that out in September, and I didn't get far. Apart from Jim Bullion, I also contacted several current and former board members of SOLA.

But most of them didn't respond. And the few responses I did get were either noncommittal or (in one case) very hostile.

The most senior SOLA affiliate I reached out to was Deborah Hazell, who became Treasurer in December 2021—replacing Jim Bullion, who became Chairman.

Hazell is the CEO of Unity Trust Bank in Birmingham, UK.

I left her a message via the bank's switchboard but never heard back.

Meanwhile the whole organization seemed to be maintaining radio silence. I couldn't find anything about them in the news.

Until 12 October, that is.

On that day SOLA's top management appeared in Kigali for a photo op with Rwandan President Paul Kagame.

newtimes.co.rw/article/1714/n…

The presidential office also tweeted out a couple of photos:

https://twitter.com/UrugwiroVillage/status/1580207316149751808

Standing on President Kagame's left are Basij-Rasikh and her husband Matiullah Amin (also Director of SOLA).

On his right are Jim Bullion and Deborah Hazell.

Why was the president of Rwanda so excited about the possibility that SOLA might expand its footprint in Kigali?

For that matter, what purpose would the expansion serve?

SOLA decided last February not to offer educational opportunities to Afghan girls who don't have them now.

On the school's FAQ page, Basij-Rasikh says that she plans to keep the Kigali campus open even if girls' schools reopen in Afghanistan.

But why?

Lesley Stahl describes the current campus as "temporary", so perhaps they'll build a new one.

That's one way to spend $18 million.

But I'm not sure how far the money will go. Eighteen million dollars won't buy you half of a gas station in Sheberghan.

And I wonder if Kagame might provide anything in exchange for hosting such a prestigious project.

Rwanda offers investment opportunities in various sectors.

There's no way to resolve these questions except by waiting to see what SOLA announces.

Unless you're Lesley Stahl. She could get back in touch with the school to clarify certain things.

@UNmigration can also help by publishing the financial details of its agreement with SOLA.

And any journalist who profiles Shabana Basij-Rasikh in future should begin with the same question that baffled me:

"Why do you refuse to admit girls applying from Afghanistan to your wealthy, donor-funded school?"

Everything follows from the answer.

Don't look away.

[end]