Category Archives: Britain

Afghanistan, Britain, Society, United States

Taliban’s £62bn haul of US military equipment

AFGHANISTAN

THE Taliban have seized American military equipment worth an astonishing £62 billion, a US politician has revealed.

Jim Banks, a Republican member of the House of Representatives, said the “negligence” of Joe Biden’s administration had allowed the militants to acquire an astonishing cache of weaponry.

Mr Banks said the Taliban may have taken 75,000 vehicles, 600,000 guns and more than 200 planes and helicopters.

In an emotive speech on the steps of the US Capitol building, he revealed the militants now had more Black Hawk helicopters than “85 per cent of the countries in the world.”

Astonishingly, the Taliban also have access to biometric devices, which have the fingerprints, eye scans and biographical information of the Afghans who have helped the Allied forces since 2001.

All the military hardware was donated to the Afghan army by the US over the past 20 years to help fight the insurgents. But the speed of the US withdrawal has meant much of it was abandoned by Afghan soldiers.

Mr Banks, who served in Afghanistan as an officer in charge of supplying weapons, revealed the militants also had US-issue body armour, night-vision goggles and medical supplies. He said: “Due to the negligence of this administration, the Taliban now has access to $85 billion (£62 billion) worth of American military equipment. Unbelievably, and unfathomable to me and so many others, the Taliban now has access to biometric devices.

“This administration still has no plan to get this military equipment or supplies back.”

US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan admitted he did not have a “complete picture” of how much of the missing inventory could now be in the hands of the enemy.

“We don’t have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defence material has gone, but certainly a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban,” he said.

Attempts were made by Allied forces to destroy some of the bigger weapons.

One US official said: “Everything that hasn’t been destroyed is the Taliban’s now.”

Current and former US military chiefs say there is concern that those weapons could be used to kill civilians or be seized by other groups such as the Islamic State. There are also fears they could be sold to China and Russia.

Michael McCaul, who sits on the US foreign affairs committee, said: “We have already seen Taliban fighters armed with US-made weapons they seized from the Afghan forces.

“This poses a significant threat to the United States and our allies.”

Video footage has emerged within the last few days of militants with a £4.4 million Black Hawk helicopter at an airport near Kandahar.

The chopper taxied on the tarmac but the pilot was unable to get it into the air.

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WHEN British soldiers deployed to Helmand 15 years ago their Taliban counterparts were shabbily dressed in tattered traditional outfits and armed with decades-old Russian rifles and grenade launchers.

While they possessed guile in spades and knew every inch of the jungle-like “Green Zone” where battles were fought, they were poorly equipped and poorly trained.

Now, following the withdrawal of international forces, the Taliban has been bequeathed a £62 billion bounty of military equipment, including hundreds of fixed-wing aircraft and tactical helicopters, tens of thousands of armoured vehicles and hundreds of thousands of weapons. The transformation in the group’s appearance and capability could scarcely be more vivid or disturbing.

Sandals and shalwar kameez have been replaced by combat boots and tailored camouflage uniforms.

Ancient AK47s are nowhere to be seen. Instead, today’s Taliban carry US Green Beret-issue M4 carbines with telescoping sights. The Taliban of 15 years ago were seldom if ever seen wearing helmets. But today their headwear is more expensive and more advanced than that worn by British troops.

The group appears to have helped themselves to the state-of-the-art MBITR-2 (Multi-band Intrateam Radios) favoured by US Green Berets but denied to most conventional UK personnel. They were issued to Afghan government forces.

What’s more, their weapons appear immaculately clean and well maintained, their uniforms looked washed and ironed and they carry their weapons as British soldiers are taught to carry theirs.

The UK and the US have picked up the tab not only for the eye-wateringly expensive hardware, but also the training budget – as the Taliban’s ranks have been swollen by defectors from the Afghan National Security Forces.

The irony is that the Taliban’s newfound arsenal was supposed to prevent Afghanistan falling into Taliban hands.

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Afghanistan, Art, Arts, Britain

Afghanistan cartoon & sketch

– Credit image and artwork: Paul Thomas

Afghanistan sketch

NOW that the Taliban have retaken Afghanistan without encountering any serious resistance, they’ve embarked on a public relations offensive. We are being asked to believe in Taliban 2.0, a new caring, sharing, cuddly version. Out go stonings and beheadings, in come women’s rights. Having once banned singing and dancing, the mullahs are now embracing fun. Photos have emerged of Taliban fighters driving dodgems, with their rifles on the passenger seat, and frolicking on a merry-go-round.

Ride a painted pony . . .

There was another snap of a Taliban warrior working out in a gym – with a rocket launcher over his shoulder. Feel the burn! So despite reports that they’ve already started murdering Afghans who collaborated with the Americans and British, and dragged girls as young as 12 from their homes to be forcibly ‘married’, the Taliban want the world to think they’ve reformed. The soft-headed Hard Left, particularly in Britain, are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

If you swallow that moonshine, you’re a better man than I am.

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Afghanistan, Britain, Government, Politics, Society, United States

The failure in Afghanistan has been a military and political disaster

AFGHANISTAN

LET’S be in no doubt. The UK’s latest Afghan war – the fourth since 1839 – has ended in abject failure. The shameful retreat was down to a bungled withdrawal of US forces by Joe Biden, who’s lacklustre approach leaves his leadership open to criticism of weakness and inadequacy. What extraordinary and pitiful scenes the world has witnessed in recent days: bodies falling from the sky, the Taliban cheering in Kabul and the mighty America humbled. The Taliban on the ground is operating akin to the Nazis as they go door-to-door in neighbourhoods seeking retribution against those that supported the West. There is a growing sense of unease, and rightly too, as the West awaits what might come next.

Britain scuttled out at the same time, the prime minister telling MPs on the day of Mr Biden’s announcement that there can be no military victory in Afghanistan. What a shameful assessment given all that has been sacrificed in terms of blood and treasure plundered. The world is witnessing the extent of the military and political catastrophe after twenty years of miscalculation and misadventure.  

The UK is currently driven by a desire to stay close to the US. But America is a superpower, able to shrug off defeats and move on. The blow of losing Kabul is felt more deeply in Britain shorn itself of substantial global influence. And, yet, this has led the UK to take Washington’s lead in military affairs. In Afghanistan, the US judgment that a combination of special forces, local proxies and air power would wipe out domestic resistance to a military occupation was flawed. The Afghan security forces that NATO trained were exposed as a shell and collapsed at a time when it was most needed. In 20 years of relentless fighting, more than 170,000 Afghans have lost their lives. The death toll continues to rise as the barbarism of the Taliban metes out savage reprisals against local Afghans and interpreters who helped western intelligence services and the British Army in a quest for democracy and more moderate living. In June, almost 1,000 Afghans were killed in the simmering civil war. A few weeks later half the country was under Taliban control.

Western politicians prefer to tell a story of progress in Afghanistan. But that could all be unravelled now the Taliban are in control. Since 2001, the US has spent nearly $145bn (£106bn) trying to rebuild Afghanistan. By 2019, the average Afghan student received four years of schooling (twenty years ago it was just two). As prosperity was building, Afghans were known to have lived healthier and longer lives and the country is certainly wealthier than it was in 2001. But as many will soon realise the state can only function with international aid. Aid funds three-quarters of total public expenditure.

Elections were held in Afghanistan but the institutions that support democracy were not allowed to take root. One elected president, Hamid Karzai, fell out with the Americans so badly he threatened to join the Taliban himself. The other, Ashraf Ghani, fled as the Taliban advanced. Almost every other Afghan ruler in the 20th century was assassinated, lynched or deposed. A western-made “liberal democracy” has fallen into the hands of religious fanatics with close links to al-Qaeda. It must be clear by now that nations cannot be hustled at the barrel of an American gun into the postmodern age, especially when they have not been allowed to come to terms with modernity.

In Afghanistan, the battle for hearts and minds was lost long ago. Without hearts and minds, one cannot obtain intelligence, and without intelligence, the insurgents will remain undefeated.

The Royal United Services Institute, a security thinktank, describes the outcome in Afghanistan as “strategically worse than the situation prior to the 9/11 attacks – a Taliban state, with terror groups already baked into it, with nowhere else to turn for major support other than Beijing”.

The collapse of the Taliban in 2001 encouraged the US to adopt a similar strategy in Iraq and Libya. After 20 years of disastrous results, British ministers should reach for a new approach. After all, relations between London and Washington have historically never been entirely unconditional. Yet, whilst the government speaks of creating new special forces regiments and naval “littoral strike groups” for international interventions, Britain needs to learn its own history. It used to station military forces around the world to maintain its empire. It should think again before doing so for someone else.

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