Taliban fighters seize U.S. equipment left behind
KABUL, Afghanistan — When Taliban fighters rode triumphantly into Kabul airport early Tuesday, they did so on U.S.-supplied pickup trucks, wearing U.S.supplied uniforms and brandishing U.S.-supplied M4 and M16 rifles. Then they spent hours examining the bonanza of materiel that American troops unintentionally bequeathed them in what had been the U.S.’ last redoubt in Afghanistan.
“This is ghaneema,” said one uniformed Taliban fighter: war booty. With a gloved hand, he snapped up the night-vision goggles on his ballistic helmet, looking like the very model of an Afghan soldier the U.S. had tried to help create to eliminate people like him. He walked inside a hangar and gawked with his squad mates at the U.S. Embassy helicopters gleaming under powerful overhead lights.
The choppers were just part of the Taliban’s haul. The group’s blindingly fast sweep through most of Afghanistan netted it billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. military equipment and weaponry given to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, which collapsed in the 11 days before the Taliban seized Kabul, the capital, on Aug. 15. Afghan soldiers who didn’t surrender shed their uniforms and gear and turned tail, following many of their military and political leaders.
For their effort, Taliban fighters reaped almost 2,000 Humvees and trucks; more than 50 armored fighting vehicles, including MineResistant Ambush Protection vehicles, or MRAPs; scores of artillery and mortar pieces; more than a dozen aging but working helicopters and attack aircraft; a dozen tanks; seven
Boeing-manufactured drones; and millions upon millions of bullets, according to a list compiled by the Oryx Blog, which tracks weapons used in conflicts.
Many of the items had been disabled by departing U.S. troops or are beyond the ken of Taliban fighters to operate. But a bitter irony of the chaotic Western withdrawal from Afghanistan is that the very group the U.S. ousted 20 years ago is not only back in power but betterequipped militarily than ever before to repel adversaries and enforce its brand of repressive rule.
Slightly less than onethird of the $83 billion Washington spent on the Afghan defense forces went toward materiel, estimates say. That it now lies in the hands of the U.S.’ erstwhile enemy is a source of embarrassment for the Biden administration, with former President Donald Trump inveighing in a statement Monday that “ALL EQUIPMENT should be demanded to be immediately returned to the United
States,” along with “every penny” of its cost.
The arms have transformed the Taliban into a skewed version of the army the U.S. wanted the Afghans to have. One commander in the Taliban’s elite Fateh Zwak group proudly showed off the brown-gray pickups once used by the CIA-backed National Directorate for Security, the Afghan government’s intelligence service. The only thing different was the insignias.
Many of the fighters acted the part too, demonstrating what Dan Grazier, who served as a Marine in Afghanistan and is now a defense policy analyst at the Washington-based Project on Government Oversight, said was behavior suggesting they had once been part of the Afghan security forces that had been trained by Americans.
“The stance, the way they’re holding the rifles, the trigger finger, how’s it’s flat and laying outside the trigger guard,” he said. “That’s hallmark American military training right there.”
The leftover U.S. gear is omnipresent in Kabul, where Taliban fighters wielding shiny black M4s on dark-green Ford Ranger trucks is a routine sight. Humvees protect bigger government buildings. (The U.S. gave the Afghan army almost 5,000 M4s and machine guns in 2017, according to reports from Washington’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.)
Less frequently seen are the more lethal weapons, including the A-29 Super Tucano, a turboprop attack aircraft reminiscent of a World War II-era Mustang but with modern avionics, and helicopters such as MD-530s and Black Hawks.
U.S. troops “demilitarized,” or rendered inoperable, 73 aircraft left behind at Kabul airport, along with some 70 MRAP vehicles and 27 Humvees, U.S. Central Command said. The deliberate sabotage was evident Tuesday, when Taliban officials toured the airport grounds.