US ‘CACHE’ IN THE TALIBANK
Admin cedes loss of military hardware
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan admitted Tuesday that the Taliban gained significant troves of military hardware and weaponry that they took from Afghan security forces — and the Biden administration is still trying to determine the amount of American equipment that is now in the hands of the extremists.
“We don’t have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defense materials has gone but certainly, a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban, and obviously we don’t have a sense that they are going to readily hand it over to us at the airport,” Sullivan told reporters at a White House briefing during which he faced an onslaught of questions over the Biden administration’s handling of the sudden troop withdrawal.
The Taliban, during their lightning advance over the past week to take control of Afghanistan, amassed a variety of weapons the United States supplied to Afghan forces, including guns, ammunition and even Black Hawk helicopters.
Maj. Gen. Hank Taylor was asked at a Pentagon briefing on Monday what actions the United States was taking to prevent military equipment being destroyed or taken by the Taliban.
“I don’t have the answer to that question,” he responded.
Sullivan blamed the Afghan troops for handing the weapons over without a fight despite widespread criticism from across the political and international spectrum of President Biden’s handling of the troop withdrawal.
“Those Black Hawks were not given to the Taliban,” Sullivan said. “They were given to the Afghan National Security Forces to be able to defend themselves at the specific request and President Ghani who came to the Oval Office and asked for additional air capability, among other things.”
At that point, he said, Biden had a choice: “He could not give it to them, with the risk that it would fall into the Taliban’s hands eventually, or he could give it to them, with the hope that they could deploy in service of defending their country.”
He said the commander in chief attempted to make the best decision based on the country’s national security interests.
“And from that perspective, he believes the decision he made in this context was the right decision,” Sullivan said.
In an interview Monday, Sullivan had said Afghan forces lacked the will to defend their country.
The speed of the collapse in Afghanistan “is because at the end of the day, despite the fact we spent 20 years and tens of billions of dollars to give the best equipment, the best training and the best capacity to the Afghan National Security Forces, we could not give them the will and they ultimately decided that they would not fight for Kabul and they would not fight for the country,” he told NBC’s “Today.”
GOP Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida said the US has now made the Taliban more powerful than they were before 9/11 because of the weapons they’ve seized.
“Now the Taliban have access to massive caches of heavy weaponry, artillery, armored vehicles, ammunition,” Waltz told Fox News Sunday. “We have no bases, no allies, no host government, not even a northern alliance. This is far worse.”