Pic of the Day: Afghan Taliban Heading to Pakistan Border in American M1117 Guardian Vehicles

We armed a ghost army and when it vanished the keys and the guns stayed, so now our beige beasts roll under a foreign flag toward Pakistan as a seven billion dollar punchline to a war that ended with a mad scramble to the runway.

Would someone please tell me why we didn’t deny the enemy and destroy all of our military equipment when the powers that be decided to “pop smoke” and leave Afghanistan?

Anyone? Anyone?

Yeah, I have no clue either.

But it does give us a photo opportunity. Today, we have a photo of what appears to be several American M1117 armored security vehicles heading toward the border of Pakistan to continue their ongoing border skirmishes.

Taliban in an American pickup trying hard to look like us. Image Credit: The US Sun

Taliban Humvees — A parade of American Humvees driven by the Taliban. You get the point. Image Credit: The US Sun

The Arsenal We Left Behind

The featured photo tells a blunt story. Taliban fighters cruising an Afghan highway in American M1117 Guardian armored vehicles. The same beige boxes built to keep U.S. troops alive now carry Afghan Taliban troops in a spectacle that is part victory parade, part war souvenir. The question is not whether gear and equipment were left. It is how much, what kind, and why we did not torch the lot on the way out.

What Was Left

By the Pentagon’s own watchdog accounting, about 7.12 billion dollars’ worth of U.S. funded military equipment remained in Afghanistan when the Afghan government collapsed in August 2021. That sum came from gear previously transferred to Afghan forces over many years. When Kabul fell, it stayed put, and much of it ended up in Taliban hands.

The list reads like a mid-sized nation’s order of battle. A 2022 Defense Department report tallied 78 aircraft, about 40,000 military vehicles, and more than 300,000 individual weapons still in country. That haul spanned Humvees and MRAPs, cargo trucks, and armored vehicles like the M1117 Guardian. It included rifles and machine guns, along with night-vision and communications gear that give fighters an edge after dark.

SIGAR, the government’s Afghanistan watchdog, corroborated the picture and added color. U.S. and allied troops destroyed or disabled some gear in ad hoc scrapping runs at the Kabul airport and the U.S. Embassy compound in the final days, but vast stocks remained scattered on bases and in depots once the Afghan forces stopped showing up for work.

Much of the fleet was always going to be hard to keep running without U.S. contractor maintenance. The watchdogs warned operability would decay fast. Still, the Taliban have managed to keep a visible share of vehicles and weapons rolling, and some of those arms have turned up across the border markets that feed insurgents in Pakistan.

Two ways to continue to read this article.

Why We Didn’t Destroy It All First, ownership. Most of the equipment had been formally transferred to Afghan security forces over two decades. It was not technically American property on paper by the end, which shaped both planning and options. The policy through summer 2021 still bet on an Afghan army that could hold major cities, so the United States kept supplying it and did not pre-emptively strip its kit. Second, time and risk. Once the collapse began, the mission pivoted to evacuating people. Troops removed or destroyed nearly all major U.S.-used equipment, then focused on flights and perimeter defense. There was not enough bandwidth to crisscross Afghanistan, spiking every vehicle and warehouse. On the ground in Kabul, demolition had to be selective to avoid creating hazards around a civilian airport jammed with evacuees. Third, feasibility. Scrapping an army’s worth of gear is not a Hollywood montage. Many items were spread across remote bases that had already fallen. Some aircraft were flown out to neighboring countries by Afghan pilots; others were rendered inoperable where they sat. Even then, disabling is a spectrum. A depot can be “deadlined” for lack of parts and still yield rifles and truckloads to a new owner. The Picture Today The result is the world we can see. Taliban columns of American armor that once patrolled the same valleys in the other direction. M1117 Guardians, built for U.S. military police, are now the Taliban’s highway escorts of choice. Weapons and optics have seeped into Pakistan’s conflict zones, where militants enjoy a sharper night bite than before. It is a seven-billion dollar lesson in how wars end. You can load planes with people or pallets, but not both at the same time. You can hand a partner an arsenal, but you cannot guarantee who holds the keys when the music stops.