We now officially know the price tag for all the gear Antony Blinken donated to the Taliban. When Blinky had his very own personal Saigon moment and evacuated Afghanistan in a cloud of chaos, confusion and suicide bombings, leaving behind too many innocent dependents to count, he also left a whole bunch of high-tech war equipment laying around.
The price of incompetence
Uncle Sam left $7 billion worth of military equipment behind when America bailed out on the amateur Afghan government. It had accumulated there over the course of 16 years. CNN got to take a look at the report ordered by congress, freshly released by the Department of Defense.
Along with adding up the price tags, the report confirms that all of this “equipment is now in a country that is controlled by the very enemy the U.S. was trying to drive out over the past two decades: the Taliban.” Blinken still can’t live down the disgrace.
They can have it, Pentagon officials say. They don’t care about the price. “The Defense Department has no plans to return to Afghanistan to ‘retrieve or destroy‘ the equipment.” YouTube was full of videos of the goat humpers trying to fly Black Hawk choppers over Kandahar.
They’ll never be able to figure out how to maintain or use half the equipment they looted. “Much of the remaining equipment” left in Afghanistan requires “specialized maintenance that DoD contractors previously provided” to Afghan forces “in the form of technical knowledge and support.”
Nobody likes to talk about the fact that America also “gave a total of $18.6 billion of equipment to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces.” It wasn’t all at once though. That was “from 2005 to August 2021.”
To soften the blow, authors of the report note that we all ready had it paid for on the books, forgetting that the important part is that it’s being used for terror now. Out of the $18.6 billion total, “equipment worth $7.12 billion remained in Afghanistan after the US withdrawal was completed on August 30, 2021.” They think the price reports will distract everyone from thinking about what the inventory list names.
An unlimited cost in security
No matter what the monetary price of the abandoned weaponry is, the real cost is drastically decreased security. Blinky and his minions left behind “aircraft, air-to-ground munitions, military vehicles, weapons, communications equipment and other materials.”
The sort of communications equipment and other materials which can’t be ordered from Amazon.
Blinky still throws paperweights at anyone who dares to mention the word “Saigon” in his presence.
He’s not happy to see the report leak in the liberal press because he knows the “huge value of the hardware left behind will serve to refocus attention on the chaotic and hasty Afghanistan withdrawal that has been heavily criticized by lawmakers from both parties.” Say the “S” word and you’ll pay a heavy price, he snarls.
Also on the price list of equipment being written off to ISIS are five Mi-17 helicopters that had been in Afghanistan. Technically, they weren’t ours anymore, so that makes it alright. They “were officially transferred to Ukraine in 2022, though they were already in Ukraine for maintenance before the US left Afghanistan.”
Also included are “non-standard munitions” as part of the Ukraine deal, “including about 37,000 122mm howitzer rounds.” Oh, almost forgot about the “15 million rounds of Ball rifle ammunition, over 99,000 40mm high-explosive/fragmentation grenade cartridges, and about 119,000 82mm high-explosive mortar rounds.” Wait, there’s more. “Over 40,000 of the total 96,000 military vehicles the US gave to Afghan forces remained in Afghanistan at the time of the US withdrawal, including 12,000 military Humvees.” The spy gear was too numerous to mention.
