Taliban Fighters Now Well-Equipped for Decades

As if it were not enough that the Taliban took complete control of Afghanistan—imposing their will and murderous tactics on innocent citizens; endangering Americans still present in the country; and complicating efforts to extract Afghans who did provided important support, such as translators—it gets worse.

The Taliban has also seized tens of billions of dollars of military equipment and supplies, which were formerly under the control of Afghan security forces. More than $28 billion was spent equipping the Afghans between 2002 to 2017. Expenditures after that are harder to come by, but since deliveries were continuing until just last month, it is safe to assume that the total amount is much more.

Indeed, the Taliban captured essentially all the necessary ingredients to fully equip both an army and an air force, spanning the gamut from 600,000 rifles and machine guns; 76,000 vehicles, such as high-mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicles, armored trucks, and pickups; radios, night vision googles, and drones; and 208 helicopters and fixed wing aircraft.

Of equal significance are the amounts of supplies they acquired in the process: millions of rounds of ammunition, spare parts, grenades, uniforms, boots, meals, fuel, and rockets—enough to sustain Taliban military efforts for years.

While some have been concerned about the Taliban’s use of the aircraft left behind, Heritage Foundation senior fellow of defense, John Venable, recently explained that should not be much of a worry. About 25% of Afghanistan’s air force fled to nearby countries, taken there by fleeing Afghan pilots. The fate of those aircraft is uncertain. “For the aircraft left behind,” said Venable, “lack of spare parts, contract support, and maintenance means few flyable platforms.”

For the same reasons that the Afghan air force was crippled when the Biden administration removed all the contractors who were performing maintenance for these aircraft, the Taliban will also struggle to keep even a few flying.  And that assumes they have trained pilots.

Nor do we really need to worry about the capture of this equipment revealing any American military secrets. No advanced technology was captured, like F-35 jet fighters or Patriot missile systems. What the Taliban got was basic stuff—but it was better than what they had—and they got a lot of it.

There are plenty of pictures of Taliban fighters now holding the U.S. military’s latest small arms, such as the M4 carbine or the M16A4 rifle. These are far superior weapons to the AK-47s they had before, many of which dated back to the days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Also worrisome is the reported capture of 16,000 night vision googles, enabling their fighters an equal ability to operate at night, cancelling the normal advantage U.S. forces possess in operating during hours of darkness.

There has been some speculation that the U.S. might try to destroy at least some of the high-value equipment left behind, like the helicopters or the attack aircraft. Given, however, the timidity of the administration’s response displayed thus far to the unfolding situation, that seems unlikely. It’s not that they can’t—the U.K., for example, sent 300 elite troops into Kabul to extract their citizens while U.S. forces remain caged up at the Kabul airport.

While the Taliban and other adversaries won’t learn any secrets from the equipment, the seizure means that the Taliban is a vastly better-equipped fighting force than it was two months ago. If the U.S. or any other nation in the future seeks to conduct military operations against them, they would face modern equipment in a firefight, a prospect no soldier relishes.

There is also the distasteful prospect that the Taliban could sell or transfer some of this equipment to transnational terror groups, such as ISIS or Al Qaeda, for them to use against U.S. citizens or partner countries.

Once the Taliban started sweeping across the country, it was too late to do anything to secure this equipment.  It was found in hundreds of Afghan military units, depots, and warehouses spread across Afghanistan. Indeed, the die was cast when the decision was made to precipitously remove all U.S. military forces and contract support from the Afghan Army—support which previously enabled their air force and Afghan soldiers realized that no help was going to be forthcoming from Kabul.

President Joe Biden ignored human nature when he predicted it was “highly unlikely” the Taliban would overrun everything. Of war, Napoleon said, “The moral is to the physical as three to one.” Meaning, even though there were supposedly more than 300,000 members of the Afghan security forces, without morale and confidence, those numbers were meaningless against a determined enemy.

When the contractors keeping Afghan planes in the air and the small but significant presence of U.S. forces were abruptly removed, it created a crisis of confidence that spread like wildfire.

Now, with this mass transfer of military equipment, the Taliban will be a more capable force for years to come. It didn’t have to happen.

Image via Yahoo. Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.

The Dangers of Speaking the Truth Diminish If We Work Together

It’s becoming harder and harder for patriots to ignore the deep suppression of truth that’s happening in America today.

In all of my years in journalism, I have never received as many threats or been attacked by big companies like Google and Facebook as I have in 2021. I’d say that ever since we started covering widespread voter fraud, government-endorsed Pandemic Panic Theater, vaccine cover-ups, Critical Race Theory, and the various Neo-Marxist and Satanic agendas at play, I’ve been targeted more in months than the entirety of my life prior.

Speaking the truth is getting harder with so much censorship and suppression rampant. Prior to 2020, I was not a “conspiracy theorist” or an “anti-vaxxer,” but if there’s one thing the onslaught of exposed lies have taught us in the last 18 months, it’s that we cannot take what we’re told by the “arbiters of truth” at face value. There’s an agenda behind every message, a narrative driving every story, and a series of gigantic cover-ups designed to keep the masses in the dark.

This is why we’re building a network of news outlets that are willing to go against the narrative and expose the truth. We need help. We’re establishing strong partnerships with like-minded news outlets and courageous journalists. Even as Big Tech suppresses us, the honest messages they’re trying to quash are finding their way to the eyes and ears of patriots across the nation. With the help of new content partners like The Epoch Times and The Liberty Daily, we’re starting to see a real impact.

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