{"id":683107,"date":"2021-08-25T12:36:19","date_gmt":"2021-08-25T16:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=683107"},"modified":"2021-08-25T12:36:23","modified_gmt":"2021-08-25T16:36:23","slug":"u-s-leaving-behind-75000-vehicles-600000-weapons-208-aircraft-in-afghanistan-watchdog-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/u-s-leaving-behind-75000-vehicles-600000-weapons-208-aircraft-in-afghanistan-watchdog-says\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S. Leaving Behind 75,000 Vehicles, 600,000 Weapons, 208 Aircraft In Afghanistan, Watchdog Says"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">26<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fu-s-leaving-behind-75000-vehicles-600000-weapons-208-aircraft-in-afghanistan-watchdog-says%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=683107&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/humvee-2.jpg?w=1200&amp;h=800&amp;ixlib=react-9.0.3\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" \/><\/div>\n<p>A government watchdog group says the U.S. military is leaving behind 75,000 vehicles, 600,000 weapons and 208 aircraft in Afghanistan as forces evacuate the country after a 20-year war.<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019ve made the Taliban into a major U.S. arms dealer for the next decade,\u201d said Adam Andrzejewski, CEO of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.openthebooks.com\/the-national-desk-75000-us-military-vehicles-now-in-the-hands-of-the-taliban\/\">Open the Books<\/a>. \u201cThey now control 75,000 military vehicles. This is about 50,000 tactical vehicles, 20,000 Humvees they control about 1,000 mine-resistant vehicles, and even about 150 armored personnel carriers.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Since 2001, the U.S. has spent $83 billion on Afghan security forces through training and equipment, he said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe built them a pretty amazing war chest and now all of it is in the hands of the Taliban,\u201d said Andrzejewski. \u201cWe know that last month, as late as July, seven new helicopters were being delivered in the capital city of Kabul.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>While the watchdog was able to tally up equipment to be left behind, the group said the numbers are not complete.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe found a Federal Audit that detailed up to $200 million worth of drones that had disappeared,\u201d Andrzejewski said. \u201cWe don\u2019t know where 600,000 weapons are within the country.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The left-behind equipment and weapons are worth billions.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhile it\u2019s virtually impossible to operate advanced aircraft without training, seizing the hardware gives the militants a propaganda boost and underscores the amount of wasted funds on U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan over the last 20 years,\u201d The Hill <a href=\"https:\/\/thehill.com\/policy\/defense\/568493-billions-in-us-weaponry-seized-by-taliban?rl=1\">reported<\/a> this week.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen an armed group gets their hands on American-made weaponry, it\u2019s sort of a status symbol. It\u2019s a psychological win,\u201d Elias Yousif, deputy director of the Center for International Policy\u2019s Security Assistance Monitor, told the website. \u201cClearly, this is an indictment of the U.S. security cooperation enterprise broadly. It really should raise a lot of concerns about what is the wider enterprise that is going on every single day, whether that\u2019s in the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The Hill reported that \u201cbetween 2003 and 2016, the United States transferred 75,898 vehicles, 599,690 weapons, 162,643 pieces of communications equipment, 208 aircraft, and 16,191 pieces of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance equipment to Afghan forces, according to a 2017 Government Accountability Office report.&nbsp;From 2017 to 2019, the United States also gave Afghan forces 7,035 machine guns, 4,702 Humvees, 20,040 hand grenades, 2,520 bombs and 1,394 grenade launchers, among other equipment, according to a report last year from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).\u201d<\/p>\n<p>White House national security adviser <span class=\"rollover-people\" data-behavior=\"rolloverpeople\">Jake Sullivan<\/span> said Tuesday that the equipment is lost to the Taliban, \u201cand obviously, we don\u2019t have a sense that they are going to readily hand it over to us at the airport.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe don\u2019t have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defense materials has gone, but certainly a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<p>Still, Sullivan defended&nbsp;<span class=\"rollover-people\" data-behavior=\"rolloverpeople\">President Joe Biden<\/span>\u2019s decision to leave Afghanistan, saying \u201cthose Black Hawks were not given to the Taliban. They were given to the Afghan National Security Forces to be able to defend themselves at the specific request of [Afghan] President [Ashraf] Ghani, who came to the Oval Office and asked for additional air capability, among other things.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSo the president had a choice. He could not give it to them with the risk that it would fall into the Taliban\u2019s hands eventually, or he could give it to them with the hope that they could deploy it in service of defending their country,\u201d Sullivan continued. \u201cBoth of those options had risks. He had to choose. And he made a choice.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>The Daily Wire is one of America\u2019s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/subscribe\">member<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A government watchdog group says the U.S. military is leaving behind 75,000 vehicles, 600,000 weapons and 208 aircraft in Afghanistan as forces evacuate the country after a 20-year war.We\u2019ve made &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-683107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=683107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683107\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=683107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=683107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=683107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}