As American struggle with supply chain issues at home, the Taliban recently displayed an overabundance of American goods in a military parade that helped highlight how it’s become more than just a ragtag militia, but a real army.
“Taliban forces held a military parade in Kabul using captured American-made armored vehicles and Russian helicopters in a display that showed their ongoing transformation from an insurgent force to a regular standing army,” said Reuters.
A line of desert-tan, American M117 armored vehicles paraded down the sparsely populated streets in Kabul to a mostly male gathering of onlookers, while MI-17 Russian helicopters buzzed buildings above the parade route.
Reuters said many of the soldiers were carrying standard issue American M-4 rifles.
Agence France-Presse said that a similar parade was held in “Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city and the militants’ spiritual heartland, using former Afghan and international forces vehicles and helicopters to inaugurate their new ‘Islamic Emirate Army,’” via a tweet.
VIDEO: The Taliban hold a military parade in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city and the militants’ spiritual heartland, using former Afghan and international forces vehicles and helicopters to inaugurate their new “Islamic Emirate Army” pic.twitter.com/IsH4z9tRL2
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) November 9, 2021
The web site Twitchy hosted a handful of videos from the parades, commenting using code for Joe Biden: “Heckuva job, Brandon. The latest from Kabul and none of it good.”
“It is unconscionable that high-tech military equipment paid for by U.S. taxpayers has fallen into the hands of the Taliban and their terrorist allies,” said GOP lawmakers in a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. “Securing U.S. assets should have been among the top priorities for the U.S. Department of Defense prior to announcing the withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
Then Biden administration has encountered a great deal of criticism from both the Left and the Right on how the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was conducted over the summer—a withdrawal that left American civilians, allies and billions of dollars in valuable weaponry abandoned behind enemy lines.
“Leading U.S. intelligence agencies failed to predict the rapid Taliban takeover of Afghanistan prior to the final withdrawal of American troops and instead offered scattershot assessments of the staying power of the Afghan military and government,” said the Wall Street Journal after reviewing several intelligence estimates during the withdrawal.
