WASHINGTON – Much of the $7.1 billion in military equipment and technology President Biden left behind in Afghanistan after his botched withdrawal was still operable despite Pentagon claims to the contrary – including fingerprint devices the Taliban later used to track down down American’s abandoned Afghan allies, according to a comprehensive report by the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the fiasco.
Throughout the August 2021 withdrawal and its aftermath, both the Defense Department and the Harris-Biden administration repeatedly asserted that “nearly all equipment used by US military forces in Afghanistan was either retrograded or destroyed prior to our withdrawal.”
However, the report, released Sunday following a nearly two-year investigation, indicated that the administration’s denials were largely semantics.
While the US military destroyed or moved most of its own equipment, they left intact billions in weapons and materiel transferred to the Afghan military, which collapsed along with the Western-backed Kabul government before the last American troops left the central Asian nation on Aug. 30, 2021.
“When questioned about the weapons left behind, [US Forces Afghanistan commander Gen. Austin Scott] Miller informed the committee those were the property of the Afghan government and had been provided pursuant to US security assistance to the Afghan forces,” the report said. “The idea was that those weapons were ‘going to be used, not abandoned.’”
Responding to the report on Monday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby insisted that “there was no handover of US equipment to the Taliban.”
“That equipment had been provided to Afghan security forces appropriately and with congressional approval over the course of two decades of war,” he said. “That equipment was left by those Afghan forces when they surrendered or stopped fighting.”
Still, officials told the committee that there were obvious signs that Kabul would fall to the Taliban as the US withdrew – meaning the Harris-Biden administration should have predicted that the terrorist group would ultimately own any equipment left behind.
“It was clear to the administration at that point in time, that it was not a matter of if Afghanistan would fall to the Taliban, but a matter of when,” the report said.
“Greg Sherman, the deputy assistant secretary of state and assistant director of High Threat Programs Directorate — the security and law enforcement arm of State Department — stated, ‘it did not take a crystal ball,’ even in May of 2021, to see ‘the Afghan Government would fall apart.’”
Kirby claimed Monday “there was no fine-tuned assessment of how fast things would unfold in August of 2021,” and added that the collapse “moved a lot faster than anyone anticipated.”
“As the Taliban moved in, Afghan forces stopped fighting and the Ghani government fled,” he said. “As then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley said, ‘Nothing that I saw indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.‘”
The equipment was left behind even though the military spent four months tearing down and shipping home thousands of pieces of other military hardware from US sites in Afghanistan after Biden announced his decision to end the 20-year war in April 2021.
“The Taliban claim to have recovered 40 operational aircraft from the former Afghan government, including two Mi-17 helicopters, two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, two MD-530 light helicopters, two Mi-24 helicopter gunships, and one fixed-wing transport aircraft — all of which have since been observed flying according to the UN Sanctions Monitoring,” the report said.
Some of that equipment was seen in as recently as last month, when Taliban fighters hosted a military parade to celebrate the three-year anniversary of recapturing Kabul.
“During the parade, the Taliban showcased their ability to operate tanks, helicopters, and Humvees left behind by US and coalition forces,” the report said.
The equipment captured by the Islamic fundamentalists did not just include military weaponry, but also key technological tools and sensitive databases that put Afghans who had helped the US at great risk.
“American technology has empowered the Taliban to systematically target Afghan allies,” the committee said. “A 2022 report by the Defence Education Enhancement Programme (DEEP) of NATO discovered the Taliban gained access to US military-maintained biometric devices and databases after the withdrawal.”
“The biometric devices in question are enabled to recognize fingerprint, eye scan, and facial information, and the DEEP report warned that the Taliban had access to biometric data allowing them to identify civilians that worked with the United States or NATO.”
On Monday, committee chairman Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) told MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” that the Taliban “goes door to door [and] checks fingerprints” of residents before torturing and killing those found to have assisted the US and NATO.
Other military goods were siphoned off even before the Afghanistan collapse thanks to negligence on the part of the military, the report charged.
When the US handed the sprawling Bagram Air Base over to Afghan forces in July 2021, the Harris-Biden administration failed to properly communicate its plans. Instead, the military cut off the installation’s water and left in the middle of the night, keeping the base’s new Afghan commander literally in the dark about their departure.
“Afghan General Mir Asadullah Kohistani — who took over command of Bagram for the Afghan military — asserted he heard a ‘rumor that the Americans had left Bagram … and finally by seven o’clock in the morning, we understood that it was confirmed that they had already left Bagram,’” the report said.
“Darwaish Raufi — Afghanistan’s district administrator for Bagram — confirmed General Kohistani’s account, stating the U.S. departure from Bagram had occurred without proper coordination with local Afghan officials.”
This meant the base – home to three large hangars, a control tower and two runways, one of which cost $96 million to build – was left unsecured enough that “looters made their way to Bagram before the Afghan military became aware of the American departure.”
However, Gen. Frank McKenzie, the then-head of US Central Command, denied the allegation when asked by the committee.
“We did this in close coordination with our allies and partners,” he told the committee. “Every departure of every element was carefully synchronized across the coalition and with our Afghan partners. On no occasion were they caught unaware by our movements.”
