[Stars & Stripes] WASHINGTON — An independent watchdog who investigated U.S. military operations in Afghanistan said Tuesday that American forces left behind billions of dollars in weapons, vehicles and equipment and the Taliban has learned how to use some of it, including aircraft."See that plane? We're going to make it an auger"
John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, or SIGAR, released a report outlining U.S. failures in the country after 20 years of war there. The report includes reasons why Afghan government forces fell so quickly to the Taliban when the United States withdrew in 2021 and states roughly $7.2 billion in American military equipment was left in Afghanistan.
The equipment includes at least 78 aircraft worth more than $920 million, 40,000 vehicles, more than 300,000 weapons and thousands of air-to-ground munitions.
"Some of [the equipment] was destroyed, a lot of it wasn’t," Sopko told reporters Tuesday in Washington. "Was I surprised? No. [The Pentagon] had a horrible system in place to keep track of weapons and where they were and how they were maintained."
Sopko, the SIGAR since 2012, said some of the U.S. equipment left behind was "sophisticated" — such as night vision and communications hardware — and Taliban militants have probably learned how to operate some of it by now.
Yea, probably. Probably had some 'stay behinds' on contract. Never did get a good number on 'stay behinds' did we ?
"That’s a concern," he said. "We have seen and we have picked up intelligence that the Taliban are actually flying some of the helicopters and some of the planes. ... But it’s a concern. That’s a lot of hardware and a lot of weaponry."
A preliminary version of the SIGAR report, titled "Why the Afghan Security Forces Collapsed," was given to Congress last year and concludes there were several reasons why the Afghan government fell so quickly — such as government corruption, poor planning and low morale among Afghan troops, especially when the U.S. said it would pull out.
Nothing to do with thousands of years of Tribal culture, religion, banditry, etc.
"This is like the house of cards. When you pull one card, you can see the next one going. Or maybe dominoes is the [analogy]," Sopko said. "When you pulled out the support for the Afghan government, the morale started to crater."
The report said Afghanistan was a failure mainly because the United States "lacked the political will to dedicate the time and resources necessary to reconstruct an entire security sector in a war-torn and impoverished country."
"The U.S. and Afghan governments share in the blame. Neither side appeared to have the political commitment to doing what it would take to address the challenges, including devoting the time and resources necessary to develop a professional [Afghan military], a process that takes decades," the report reads. "The February 2020 decision to commit to a rapid U.S. military withdrawal sealed the [Afghan military’s] fate."