Former president Donald Trump warned Wednesday in a fiery new interview on Fox News that high-tech American weapons and hardware left behind in Afghanistan by withdrawing US troops will not only be used by the Taliban, but Washington’s adversaries across the world, including Russia.
According to Trump, speaking to Sean Hannity’s show, the US has billions of dollars’ worth of brand new Black Hawk helicopters, new army tanks and all sorts of equipment and missiles left in Afghanistan that Russia will now be examining along with China and everyone else.
He pointed he was planning to take that weaponry and hardware, including sensitive military technologies, out along with US troops withdrawal because he knew the Afghan army weren’t going to fight, but that is now impossible due to Biden’s strategic mistakes.
Trump slammed President Biden’s hasted decision to pull all US forces out of Afghanistan, calling the ensuing chaotic scenes in Kabul one of America’s most humiliating moments.
Videos released by the militant group that has now assumed de facto control over the country show Taliban fighters showing off the advanced US-made Black Hawk choppers left on a runway at Kandahar airport aside the captured hundreds of pieces of military hardware including guns, vehicles and heavy artillery.
When they took over district centres Afghan forces failed to defend, the Taliban captured an array of modern military equipment the US has spent billions of dollars for to give fighting tools to Afghan defence forces, who have since shown little appetite for fighting, Justine Fleischner of weapons-tracking group Conflict Armament Research says.
According to the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), about $83 billion of the approximately $145 billion the US government spent trying to rebuild Afghanistan, went to developing and sustaining its army and police forces.
Raffaello Pantucci, a senior fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, says the weapons will strengthen Taliban’s authority in the cities it has captured, without having to raise a single penny in the process, but could also
worsen instability in the region if they fall into the hands of extremists, with Xinjiang in China being among possible affected areas, analysts claim.
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