A government watchdog group said Monday that the Biden administration left $7.2 billion worth of U.S. military equipment under Taliban control when it abruptly left Afghanistan in 2021.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction's findings noted that aircraft, missiles, communications gear, and biometric devices were among the military equipment left.
Still, the "final tally of military equipment abandoned" in Afghanistan cannot be entirely confirmed by the United States, which provided the Afghan military with approximately $18.6 billion over the last 20 years.
SIGAR investigators have blamed Pentagon officials and other administrations — from former President George W. Bush to current President Joe Biden — for the brunt of the Afghanistan disaster.
However, the report specifically pointed to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces' lackadaisical response to President Donald Trump’s 2020 Doha Agreement as the critical reason.
"The character of the withdrawal left many Afghans with the impression that the U.S. was simply handing Afghanistan over to a Taliban government-in-waiting," the watchdog report read.
The Department of Defense, which "provided responses to SIGAR's requests for information," criticized several of the watchdog’s findings through a written response included in the final report.
In its rebuke, the Pentagon claimed U.S. officials were in touch with Afghan leadership before the withdrawal and insisted they would continue providing security assistance, despite the report's assertion that aid had been cut off.
"Since SIGAR's inception, DoD has contributed to and facilitated their work — a fact the report echoes in its opening pages," Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Rob Lodewick told The Wall Street Journal.
The investigators argued that U.S. policy failures in Afghanistan could help prevent a similar situation in Ukraine. To date, more than $110 billion has reportedly been sent over to Kyiv.
"Given the ongoing conflict and the unprecedented volume of weapons being transferred to Ukraine, the risk that some equipment ends up on the black market or in the wrong hands is likely unavoidable," the watchdog wrote.
"There is an understandable desire amid a crisis to focus on getting money out the door and to worry about oversight later, but too often that creates more problems than it solves," added SIGAR.
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