The Taliban’s Best Weaponry Comes From American Equipment Given To The Afghan Military And Police

An Afghan National Army soldier mans his position while his fire team conducts a clearing drill at the Regional Military Training Center in Helmand Province, Afghanistan (March 8, 2017). Image Credit: NATO photo by Kay M. Nissen

The Diplomat: How the US Is Indirectly Arming the Taliban

Much of the Taliban’s armory comes from American equipment given to the Afghan military and police.

While empowering allied militaries to confront insurgents on their own has become the cornerstone of the American approach to counterterrorism, that strategy comes with a drawback: those militaries often lose Western-supplied equipment to American-labeled terrorist organizations.

In 2014, the Islamic State captured weapons from Syrian rebels armed by the United States. In 2015, the Iranian-backed Iraqi militia Kataib Hezbollah acquired several M1 Abrams tanks sold to the Iraqi Security Forces by the U.S. This problem has spread as far as Afghanistan, where much of the Taliban’s armory comes from American equipment given to the Afghan military and police.

The insurgents’ Western-sourced arsenal includes lasers and night-vision goggles abandoned by Afghan and American soldiers and bought on the black market, doubling the number of nighttime Taliban attacks and tripling the rate of Afghan casualties between 2014 and 2017.

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WNU Editor: Losing weaponry in a war is normal .... but when one looks at the scale of these loses, and how groups like ISIS and the Taliban have taken advantage of it, there is clearly something wrong.