Some of this gear has already been used by the elite Badri unit as they guarded key sites, such as the Kabul airport. The Taliban could also share their weapons with other militant groups, such as the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and al-Qaida.
Those groups are already threatening the security of people across the region. Several U. Those officials are also supposed to keep careful records of which weapons are transferred to which foreign forces, and track them over time to make sure they are being stored securely — and fix any problems that arise, or even stop the weapons transfer from continuing.
But evidence shows that many arms transfers to foreign partners in support of the War on Terror lacked these basic end-use safeguards. In one instance, starting in , U.
Four days behind the Taliban front line. Can Afghan military turn the tide in Taliban fight? Who are the Taliban? This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Gen John Nicholson: "We know that the Russians are involved". Gen Nicholson's military career has been shaped by the conflict in Afghanistan. US combat operations against the Taliban officially ended in Related Topics. Published 14 March Published 23 August Published 31 January Less frequently seen — because they are not so easily usable — are the more lethal weapons, including the A Super Tucano, a turboprop attack aircraft reminiscent of a World War II-era Mustang but with modern avionics, and helicopters such as MDs and Black Hawks.
The young Marines wanted to help. They were the last Americans to die in the Afghanistan war. Parents, friends and fellow Marines remember the four young people from California killed in the Kabul airport bombing. Central Command said. The deliberate sabotage was evident Tuesday, when Taliban officials toured the airport. Although the As were arranged neatly in their hangar, they stood amid a dump of camo-patterned bags, socks, bullet boxes, grenades and discarded food packets.
Their avionics bays were open, and electronic boxes that operate vital systems, including the starter for the motors, had been ripped out, their components bashed to bits. The aircraft was a C, not a C A C transport plane parked outside squatted on one wheel, and the Black Hawks had their windows smashed and trash strewn inside bays that once carried vital supplies to Afghan soldiers or evacuated them, sometimes alive but often dead, back home.
Most ruined were the MDs. In flight, they were nimble helicopters, buzzing around and almost jousting with Taliban fighters assaulting government outposts. Now they were smooshed together in the hangar, as if a giant child had flicked them into one another. Their joysticks were cut at the handle. The disarray left some Afghans angry, including one journalist who was no friend of the Taliban. But he was also unsurprised, he said.
Some of the Afghan air force fleet had also been taken by their Afghan pilots to the Panjshir Valley in northern Afghanistan, where the anti-Taliban resistance is bunkered, or to neighboring Uzbekistan. Current and former officials say that while they are concerned about the Taliban having access to the helicopters, the aircraft require frequent maintenance and many are complicated to fly without extensive training.
Retired U. Army General Joseph Votel, who oversaw U. Central Command from to , said most of the high-end hardware captured by the Taliban, including the aircraft, was not equipped with sensitive U. There is a more immediate concern about some of the easier- to-use weapons and equipment, such as night-vision goggles. Since the United States has provided Afghan forces with at least , infantry weapons including M16 assault rifles, , pieces of communication equipment, and 16, night-vision goggle devices.
Votel and others said smalls arms seized by the insurgents such as machine guns, mortars, as well as artillery pieces including howitzers, could give the Taliban an advantage against any resistance that could surface in historic anti-Taliban strongholds such as the Panjshir Valley northeast of Kabul.
0コメント