Footage of Taliban fighters posing with US military vehicles has emerged on social media this week. A-29 attack planes, Black Hawk helicopters and American weapons all feature prominently in the photos and videos, suggesting that billions of dollars worth of equipment has been captured since the takeover of Afghanistan.
At this stage, it is not known exactly what equipment the Taliban has stolen. Jake Sullivan, a national security advisor to the White House, said, “We don’t have a complete picture of where every article of defense materials has gone, but certainly a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban.”
Sullivan added, “Those Black Hawks were not given to the Taliban. They were given to the Afghan National Security Forces to be able to defend themselves at the specific request of President Ghani, who came to the Oval Office and asked for additional air capability.”
Republican senators are demanding a full audit from the Department of Defense (DOD) to survey the extent of the losses. Among them were Bill Cassidy and Marco Rubio, who wrote an accusatory letter to United States Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, stating that they were “horrified” to see the scenes emerging from Afghanistan.
“It is unconscionable that high-tech military equipment paid for by US taxpayers has fallen into the hands of the Taliban and their terrorist allies. Securing US assets should have been among the top priorities for the US Department of Defense prior to announcing the withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
Whether or not Taliban forces will get much use out of the vehicles is a topic for debate. Elias Yousif, a security expert with the Center for International Policy, suggested that this is more of a “psychological win” than a practical one. He said, “When an armed group gets their hands on American-made weaponry, it’s sort of a status symbol.”
He continued, “They may be able to manage a flight or two or to operate them in some really limited capacity in the short term, but without long-term sustainment, maintenance, servicing, that sort of thing, it wouldn’t turn into a robust or useful military capability.”
But Yousif believes the seizure of the vehicles remains a damning indictment of American global security cooperation on the whole, suggesting that the developments “should raise a lot of concerns about what is the wider enterprise that is going on every single day, whether that’s in the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia.”
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