The Taliban’s Capture of U.S. Military Gear Is Not an ’80s Rerun

It’s far, far worse.

I n the wake of the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban have captured a large amount of American military equipment.

Exactly how much is unclear. As defense analyst Jonathan Schroden explained in an informative Twitter thread, it’s likely that the headlines about $85 billion in equipment overstate how much the Taliban have actually seized. But even if it’s much smaller than that, Jim Geraghty’s characterization in the Morning Jolt is still correct: “The Taliban have now seized one of the greatest caches of advanced military equipment ever. If we ever must fight them again, we will be fighting an enemy that is using our own weapons against us.”

“Here we go again,” you might think, recalling that the weapons the Reagan administration supplied to the mujahideen to counter the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan during the Cold War were later turned on Americans. But while it is true that the CIA supplied the mujahideen with shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, that is as far as the historical resemblance goes.

First of all, the mujahideen and the Taliban are not the same. The mujahideen were not one group, but a whole host of rebel groups opposed to the Soviet invasion. The Taliban did not exist in the ’80s; they originated after the Soviet withdrawal. Many mujahideen opposed the Taliban, and when Taliban fighters overtook the country in 1996, they had to overthrow the regime of President Burhanuddin Rabbani, a prominent mujahideen leader, to do it.

With that out of the way, let’s look at the history of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan in the ’80s.

Political scientist Alan Kuperman recounts the Stinger-missile program in detail in a 1999 article in Political Science Quarterly. For the first few years of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, there was widespread American opposition to providing high-tech weapons such as Stinger missiles to the mujahideen. “There was virtual unanimity within the [Reagan] administration on this point,” Kuperman writes. Even more important, the administration’s ally, Pakistani president Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, was vehemently opposed to such a move. All American provisions for the mujahideen were funneled through Pakistan, because Pakistani intelligence had the network of connections with Afghan rebel groups to make the provisions possible. Supplying the mujahideen with Stinger missiles would have been seen by the Soviets as an escalation, and Zia, Kuperman writes, believed that “too much escalation would cause the ‘pot to boil over,’ provoking a Soviet retaliation against Pakistan.”

It wasn’t until 1986, almost seven years after the Soviets invaded, that an alliance of some members of Reagan’s administration, conservative interest groups, and two Democratic members of Congress (Clarence Long and Charlie Wilson) succeeded in pressuring Reagan to begin sending mujahideen fighters Stinger missiles. The reassessment happened for five reasons, according to Kuperman: 1) The Soviets increased their attacks against the rebels in early 1985; 2) a bipartisan group of congressmen was stirring up support for the mujahideen and arguing they didn’t have enough firepower to defeat the Soviets; 3) Mikhail Gorbachev had taken over as Soviet premier; 4) defense analysts no longer thought the Soviets were capable of expanding the conflict into Pakistan; and 5) Pakistani president Zia thus dropped his opposition to supplying Stinger missiles. Mujahideen shot down Soviet helicopters with Stingers for the first time on September 25, 1986.

After the Soviets withdrew, hundreds of Stinger missiles were unaccounted for. Though the CIA attempted to buy them back, it had only limited success. But even so, the effect that these unaccounted-for missiles had on the 2001 American invasion of Afghanistan was negligible. According to a 2018 Business Insider story, “At the start of that war, the Pentagon said the Taliban and Al Qaeda still had 200 to 300 of the missiles. US pilots in low-flying aircraft reported seeing surface-to-air missiles fired at them, but no US aircraft were downed by Stingers.”

No part of this history is similar to what is happening in Afghanistan today. The present situation is far, far worse.

In the 1980s, the mujahideen were fighting the Soviets. The Reagan administration had a foreign policy of supporting anti-communist groups all around the world. The policy of arming the mujahideen with Stinger missiles was carried out intentionally after years of deliberation and was seen as an application of a clearly defined foreign-policy goal. That goal, the fall of the Soviet Union, was achieved a few years after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan.

It’s virtually impossible to determine causality in foreign affairs. If you listen to some of the Reagan-administration officials who supported the Stinger-missile program, they’ll just about tell you it won the Cold War. If you listen to scholars such as Kuperman, they’ll tell you the program had a limited effect and the Soviet Union was going to withdraw from Afghanistan and collapse regardless. The truth is probably somewhere in between, but either way, the policy was carried out very deliberately: Decision-makers adjusted their views as new information came in; the CIA took care to ensure that Stinger missiles got only to their intended recipients and made attempts to buy back as many excess missiles as it could after the conflict ended; and ultimately, no American aircraft were shot down by the missiles.

We have seen no evidence of that kind of decision-making or attention to detail from the Biden administration in Afghanistan. If American weapons end up in the hands of our enemies this time around, it won’t be because a well-intentioned, targeted policy of arming American allies went awry. It will be because a reckless, seat-of-the-pants withdrawal went as poorly as expected.

Accidents happen. But the equipment left behind during this withdrawal is not being left behind by accident. It’s being left behind because the Biden administration imposed an arbitrary deadline on withdrawal and failed to leave itself enough time to get everything out. As Noah Rothman wrote for MSNBC, “The mission didn’t define the timeline; the timeline defined the mission.” As part of that timeline, the U.S. pulled the rug out from under the Afghan Army by ceasing to provide air support just as the Taliban began their offensive this summer.

The Taliban’s successes meant the withdrawal had to go faster, but American choices made it harder to speed things up. The U.S. abandoned Bagram Air Base, its most secure Afghan foothold over the past 20 years, in the middle of the night on July 1, because Biden wouldn’t provide enough troops to secure it along with the airport in Kabul. That reduced the military’s capacity to airlift equipment out of the country. The military had to move so fast that it didn’t even have time to destroy the equipment it couldn’t remove to safety.

The equipment left behind is far more varied and sophisticated than anything the U.S. supplied the mujahideen in the ’80s. Nobody seriously considered giving the mujahideen aircraft, for instance, and the Taliban will have American aircraft now. (Taliban fighters have been assassinating pilots loyal to the Afghan Air Force since July to prevent them from flying the aircraft out of the country.) It’s not clear how useful the aircraft will be to the Taliban, but even if they can’t use them, they could sell them to other American enemies who would find them useful.

It was not just overwhelming force that gave America an advantage in counterterrorism. It was also the little things, such as night-vision goggles. If you can operate at night and your enemy can’t, that’s an advantage you don’t want to give away. And now, the United States has given it away, with as many as 16,000 night-vision devices left to the Taliban in Afghanistan.

These specifics are enough to prove that there’s no real comparison to be made between the end of the Afghan conflict in the 1980s and what we’ve seen over the past few weeks. But there’s one larger difference that will do the trick just as well: In the ’80s, the U.S. was working from a position of strength as the Soviet Union teetered on collapse. Today, it’s working from a position of weakness, allowing the Taliban, a group of Islamic fanatics who feel threatened by elementary-school-educated girls, dictate the terms of withdrawal to the most powerful military on the planet.

This is the Biden administration’s disaster, and there’s no amount of historical sugar that will make it a less-bitter pill to swallow.