Islamic Defence Force - Equipment
When the Taliban first ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s, they maintained a force 400 T-54 / 55 and T-62 tanks and more than 200 armored personnel carriers. After the US invasion in 2001, Taliban fighters utilized weapons ideal for guerrilla warfare, such as Kalashnikov assault rifles, DSchK heavy machine guns, RPG-7 rocket launchers, 107-mm field rocket launchers, 14.5-mm anti-aircraft machine guns, improvised explosive devices, heavy mortars, 122-mm rockets, and advanced anti-armor weaponry.
Folowing the 15 August 2021 collapse of the Western-sponsored government, the Taliban laid its hands on huge stockpiles of US-made arms, prompting fears that Afghanistan could now turn into a hornet's nest should these weapons start circulating among various jihadi and terrorist actors on the ground.
The Taliban were believed to control more than 2,000 armored vehicles [types and sources not specified]. This number is difficult to understand, since the Western-sponsored government had only slightly more than 1,000 armore personnel carriers when it imploded in 2021. Since 2003 the United States had provided Afghan forces with at least 600,000 infantry weapons including M16 assault rifles, 162,000 pieces of communication equipment, and 16,000 night-vision goggle devices. Social media showed Taliban fighters carrying M4 and M18 assault rifles and M24 sniper weapons, driving around in the iconic US Humvees and, in one video, apparently wearing US-style special forces tactical uniforms.
While it is not clear exactly how many weapons have fallen into the hands of the Afghan insurgents, the current intelligence assessment is that the Taliban's war chest now includes up to 40 aircraft, supposedly including UH-60 Black Hawks, ScanEagle military drones, scout attack helicopters, thousands of rifles, and potentially, night-vision goggles, according to Reuters.
Social media platforms were awash with images and videos allegedly showing the Afghan militants holding US-made M4 carbines, standing near Humvees, and even flying in choppers. All in all, Washington spent an estimated $83 billion on training and equipping Afghan government forces, according to The Hill. Of this sum, the US gave Kabul approximately $28 billion in weaponry between 2002 and 2017. Many accounts speak of "$85 billion worth of military equipment provided to Afghan forces over the past two decades" but this confuses training and equipment expenditures.
There is the discrepancy between the initial cost of a piece of hardware like a HMWWV [several hundred thousand $] versus the actual fair market value of the hardware that was left behind [used HMWWVs have a market price of about $5000, which is why they were left behind] Most [if not all] of the larger left behind items were “demilitarized” [sabotaged] and so might have some value as a spare parts bin but not as a weapon. Surely all of this would add up to $1 billion, but surely less than $10 billion.
Everything that had not been destroyed was believed to have fallen into the Taliban's hands. And the amount of military materiel provided to the Western-sponsored military vastly exceeds the inventory of major hardware of potential use to the Taliban. Nonetheless, on 18 August 2021, a group of 25 Republican Senators sent a letter to US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin requesting a full account of US military equipment left behind in Afghanistan, after National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan admitted a day earlier that the Taliban had grabbed "a fair amount" of weapons. American law-makers expressed fears that the US-made arms could now be used for quashing resistance and even end up in the hands of al-Qaeda and Daesh (ISIS/ISIL).
"We need to keep in mind that the weaponry of a whole military of three hundred thousand troops is seized by the Taliban, which is scattered all over the country," says Abdullah Khan, director of Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies. "It is a strong possibility that a handful of these weapons fell into the hands of terrorist organisations like ISIS and others." Furthermore, American military gear is already easily available at black markets and bazaars in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Khan notes. Still, he believes that the Taliban will make efforts to collect these weapons and keep them for themselves.
Fakhar Kakakhel, an independent analyst specialising in militancy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, shares this stance: according to him, the Afghan militant group has already started the collection and documentation of the arms seized. When it comes to weaponry finding its way to local bazaars, he suggests that these are "individual instances" and by no means "a collective policy."
Marine Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, said some of the equipment had been “demilitarized,” essentially rendered inoperable. Presumably his comments reference American operated graound equipment, rather than American supplied equipment operated by Afghan forces. American troops probably used thermite grenades, which burn at temperatures of 4,000 degrees, to destroy key components of their equipment. According to Gen McKenzie, 70 mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPs) were also abandoned, after being disabled.
"On the ramp at HKIA are a total of 73 aircraft. Those aircraft will never fly again," McKenzie said. "They'll never be able to be operated by anyone. Most of them were non-mission capable, to begin with, but certainly, they'll never be able to be flown again."
By one independent estimate as of 07 September 2021, the Taliban inherited a total of 2 operable fixed wing aircraft, along with 34 operable helicopters. A further 37 fixed wing aircraft, along with 53 helicopters were either already inoperable at the time of the regime change, or had been rendered inoperable by US forces prior to their departure.
Uzbek authorities said 22 Afghan military aircraft and 24 Afghan helicopters carrying 585 Afghan servicemen flew into Uzbekistan after the fall of the governmenton 15 August 2021, landing at Termez airport. A representative of the Afghan Embassy in Dushanbe told Eurasianet that more than 140 servicemen flew into Bokhtar airport in Tajikistan on August 15 onboard at least 16 different aircraft.
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