(RightIsRight.co) – The administration of President Joe Biden abandoned $7.2 billion worth of American military equipment in the hands of the Taliban Islamists when it left Afghanistan in 2021, a government watchdog report reveals.
Biden lost America’s 20-year-long war on terror in Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 when he decided to pull out all US forces, causing the Afghan military and government to collapse in days.
At the same time, the Taliban, who had hosted Al-Qaeda before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, reconquered the entire country with barely any effort.
The data showing $7.2 billion worth of equipment was left behind by the US military comes from a new report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) dated February 2023. SIGAR is a US government agency created by Congress in 2008.
On July 30, 2021, a SIGAR report revealed the United States had slated $82.9 billion in appropriated funding for the Afghan Security Forces Fund since the start of the US invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001.
According to the latest SIGAR report, the US military’s equipment abandoned to the Taliban when it left in a hurry includes aircraft, missiles, communications gear, and biometric devices.
Breitbart News notes that the “final tally of military equipment abandoned” could not be “entirely confirmed” by the US government, adding that the Afghan military received some $18.6 billion in equipment from the US over the last 20 years.
It noted that SIGAR investigators blamed all US administrations between President George W. Bush and President Joe Biden for “the brunt of the Afghanistan disaster.”
The watchdog’s report on why Afghanistan collapsed and fell to the Taliban after Biden’s withdrawal stressed that the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces failed to adjust appropriately to President Donald Trump’s 2020 Doha Agreement with the Taliban
“The character of the withdrawal left many Afghans with the impression that the US was simply handing Afghanistan over to a Taliban government-in-waiting,” the SIGAR report read.
It revealed the US Department of Defense “provided responses to SIGAR’s requests for information.”
However, the Pentagon also criticized several of the watchdog’s findings in a written response included in the SIGAR report.
The Defense Department argued that the US government reassured the Afghan leadership that it would keep providing security assistance to the country – while the SIGAR report claimed US aid had been terminated.
“Since SIGAR’s inception, DoD has contributed to and facilitated their work — a fact the report echoes in its opening pages,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Rob Lodewick told The Wall Street Journal.
The investigators wrote that US policy failures in Afghanistan could help prevent similar outcomes in Ukraine, which has been invaded by Putin’s Russia for a year now.
“Given the ongoing conflict and the unprecedented volume of weapons being transferred to Ukraine, the risk that some equipment ends up on the black market or in the wrong hands is likely unavoidable,” SIGAR said.
“There is an understandable desire amid a crisis to focus on getting money out the door and to worry about oversight later, but too often that creates more problems than it solves,” the watchdog added.
What is your opinion about how Biden pulled out of Afghanistan and all the military equipment he left behind? Please share your views by emailing [email protected]. Thank you.
A government watchdog group said Monday that the Biden administration left $7.2 billion worth of U.S. military equipment under Taliban control when it abruptly left Afghanistan in 2021. https://t.co/kd4GL6fHIm pic.twitter.com/iYEwGVxqtg
— NEWSMAX (@NEWSMAX) February 28, 2023
