As per reports, the arms left by the United States at the time of its withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 are being used by Pakistani Taliban militants. The spillover of these high-tech weapons and night-vision devices has also made its way into Kashmir
The weapons left by the United States at the time of its withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 have reportedly found their way into the hands of Pakistani Taliban militants.
As per a Nikkei Asia report, modern arms and “sophisticated” night-vision devices left by the US forces are being used by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to carry out attacks in Pakistan.
Since the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 2021, the TTP has returned to haunt Pakistan. Reports have also surfaced that these abandoned arms have found a way to militants in Kashmir in India.
Let’s take a look at how many weapons did the US leave in Afghanistan and how they have reached militants.
US left over $7 billion worth of weapons
According to a US Department of Defense report last year, the American troops had left $7.12 billion worth of weapons and equipment when it pulled out of Afghanistan amid the Taliban’s takeover.
Foreign Policy reported last April that $48 million worth of ammunition provided to the Afghan forces remained in the war-torn country when the US troops left.
The military equipment included 23,825 Humvees and around 900 combat vehicles.
As many as 42,000 pieces of night vision, surveillance, biometric and positioning equipment were also left behind in Afghanistan, said Foreign Policy report.
“At least 78 aircraft worth $923.3 million, 9,524 air-to-ground munitions valued at $6.54 million, over 40,000 vehicles, more than 3,00,000 weapons, and nearly all night vision, surveillance, communications, and biometric equipment provided to the [Afghan defense forces] were left behind,” a report published by Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) this February said, citing Department of Defense data.
The visuals of the Taliban fighters parading with seized US weapons had gone viral in 2021.
The officials familiar with the defence department report had said that it was unlikely for the Taliban to use the US weapons which require technical support and specialised maintenance.
But they had also expressed concerns about the Taliban fighters using small arms including automatic rifles, reported Foreign Policy.
Is TTP using abandoned US arms?
Since the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan, the TTP has once again become active in the northwest tribal areas of Pakistan, part of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
Last year alone, TTP was responsible for over 150 attacks across Pakistan that killed dozens, Al Jazeera reported citing Pakistan’s monitoring agencies.
TTP has intensified these assaults, especially after the militant group ended its ceasefire with Pakistan last November.
According to the police in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in some of these attacks, the TTP used advanced weapons and devices that had belonged to the US or Afghan forces to conduct night-time ambushes, reported Nikkei Asia.
After an attack in Peshawar on 14 January that left three police officers dead, Moazzam Jah Ansari, the provincial police chief at the time had said that the TTP had carried out a “coordinated” strike deploying high-tech equipment such as thermal weapon sights.
Earlier in 2022, Pakistan’s then interior minister Sheikh Rasheed Ahmad had claimed, following attacks on two Pakistani military camps in Balochistan province, that the Baloch Liberation Army separatists had used modern weapons left by the US and its coalition troops in Afghanistan.
Last August, the tweets shared by War Noir, a weapons and conflict research group, showed TTP militants training with modern US-made weapons purportedly possessed by the Afghan army. These arms included M24 sniper rifles, M4 carbines with Trijicon ACOG scopes, and M16A4 rifles with thermal scopes.
As per India Today, a senior police official from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa told Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist working for Geo News, that US weapons are available in the black market, some of which are coming from Ukraine and some from Afghanistan.
Security experts and police officials warn that these modern weapons put Pakistan’s security forces at a disadvantage.
Speaking to Nikkei Asia, Muhammad Feyyaz, a security expert and academic associated with the University of Management and Technology, Lahore, said these modern arms ramp up the “TTP’s capability to undertake operations under all visibility conditions and give the terror group an edge over poorly equipped law enforcement agencies, which are struggling even to [fill ranks] and have a morale problem.”
Have leftover US weapons made their way to Kashmir?
In January, authorities in Kashmir told NBC News that militants are armed with M4s, M16s and other US-made weapons and ammunition which was hardly seen before.
The officials also said that most of these weapons were recovered from Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) or Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), both Pakistan-based militant groups – that are designated as terrorist organisations by the US.
Last July, Kashmir police tweeted that they have seized a US-made M4 carbine assault rifle after an encounter with two militants from JeM.
Lieutenant colonel Emron Musavi, an Indian army spokesperson in Srinagar, told NBC News that militants from both groups were sent to Afghanistan to fight alongside or train the Taliban before the US pulled out of the war-torn nation.
“It can be safely assumed that they have access to the weapons left behind,” he added.
The Indian military has said it has recovered at least seven US-made weapons from militants.
“From the weapons and equipment that we recovered, we realised that there was a spillover of high-tech weapons, night-vision devices and equipment, which were left by the Americans in Afghanistan [and] were now finding their way toward this side,” Major General Ajay Chandpuria, an Indian army official, told Indian media last year.
Ajai Sahni, an author on counterterrorism who serves as executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management, a think tank in New Delhi, says JeM and LeT could be purchasing US weapons from the Taliban in Afghanistan, “where the United Nations says both groups have bases, or through smugglers in Pakistan”, reported NBC News.
Jonathan Schroden, director of the Countering Threats and Challenges Program at the Center for Naval Analyses, a research group based outside Washington, said: “While the US-made weapons are unlikely to shift the balance of power in the Kashmir conflict, they give the Taliban a sizable reservoir of combat power potentially available to those willing and able to purchase it”.
“When combined with the Taliban’s need for money and extant smuggling networks, that reservoir poses a substantial threat to regional actors for years to come,” he was further quoted as saying by NBC News.
Schroden also warned that these US-manufactured weapons abandoned in Afghanistan can eventually make their way to other places including Yemen, Syria and parts of Africa.
Source : FirstPost
