Will Trump be able to retrieve billions of dollars worth of abandoned US military equipment from Taliban?
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Even if Trump is advised to negotiate with the Taliban to bring back American military equipment, the process will be far more arduous than it appears, experts tell Arpan Rai. On the eve of his presidential inauguration, Donald Trump pledged at a public rally in Washington to strengthen the US military by getting back billions of dollars worth of equipment left behind in Afghanistan during the fall of Kabul in 2021.
Although it was Trump’s first administration that signed the deal with the Taliban to withdraw Nato forces, the Republican has heavily criticised the way his successor Joe Biden handled the pullout and said the Democrat gave “our military equipment, a big chunk of it, to the enemy”.
“If we’re going to pay billions of dollars a year, tell them we’re not going to give them the money unless they give back our military equipment,” Trump said, referring to humanitarian aid. “So, we will give them a couple of bucks; we want the military equipment back.”.
According to a report by the US Department of Defence in 2022, the US left behind $7bn worth of military equipment in Afghanistan as they withdrew from the country – much of it in the hands of the Nato-backed Afghan army – which was quickly seized by Taliban fighters as they swept the country.
The US forces tried to dismantle or destroy as much of their machinery as they could – from aircraft to computer systems – in the last weeks of their chaotic pull-out after 20 years of war. But huge amounts still fell to the Taliban in August 2021 when the US-trained military crumbled and surrendered to the Islamist militants.
