‘The Taliban will inherit far more U.S. weapons than ISIS did in Iraq in 2014’
With its capture of the fallen Afghan military’s U.S.-supplied arsenal, following its stunningly swift takeover of most of Afghanistan this month, the Taliban is now better armed and equipped than at any previous point in time. The capture of such a large arsenal of American-made vehicles and weapons, such as Humvees and M16s, by an adversary of the United States, immediately brings to one’s mind the infamous fall of the Iraqi city of Mosul to the Islamic State (ISIS) group in June 2014. During that previous debacle, the U.S.-armed Iraqi Army fled from a much smaller number of ISIS militants, leaving behind 2,300 Humvees and thousands of small U.S.-made arms, which the group promptly captured and used. “The Taliban will inherit far more U.S. weapons than ISIS did in Iraq in 2014,” Mark Katz, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, told me. It now seems that the estimated $83 billion the U.S. spent on equipping and training the Afghan armed forces over the last two decades has ultimately ended up benefiting the very group those forces were supposed to combat. The Taliban is not only now more heavily armed than at any point throughout its two-decade insurgency against the U.S.-led coalition, it is now even more heavily armed than when it last ruled over most of Afghanistan. “The Taliban is significantly better armed at present than it was in 2001,” Nicholas Heras, senior analyst and program head for State Resilience and Fragility at the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, told me. “Prior to the military campaign that it just executed to capture the country, the Taliban was able to amass a sizable arsenal of weapons, including U.
