A new book reveals that the U.S. required contractors to deliberately destroy the avionics systems in the helicopters of the Afghan Air Force.
Franklin Foer’s new book, The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future, offers at least one particularly jaw-dropping anecdote about the realities behind the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan.
As the [U.S. military] contractors began to leave, Congressman Tom Malinowski, a Democrat from New Jersey and one of the few full-throated critics of Biden’s withdrawal decision in the party, began asking questions of them. In late spring, he heard a story that horrified him. A contractor told him his men were obligated to rip the avionic systems out of Afghan helicopters. They were destroying the early-warning systems that enabled a pilot to avoid getting blown to bits by a rocket.
Was the U.S. mindlessly exposing allies to unnecessary risk? It seemed so. After two decades of fighting side by side with the Afghans, the United States was acting with callousness that shocked Malinowski. Because he had served as the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor in the Obama administration – and he was friends with the likes of Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan – he began to ask around about the contractor’s complaint.
His friendships yielded a quick response. But what he learned only further horrified him. A contract with the manufacturer of the early-warning systems specified that they were to be used by the U.S. government. The Pentagon read these contracts literally: The fact that there were no longer Americans plausibly to protect meant there was no choice but to destroy these systems. By ripping out the equipment, contractors were rendering the helicopters effectively useless. They were destroying the army’s air cover, its most important battlefield advantage. The Afghan soldier on the front line could be forgiven for fearing that he was now on his own.
As of July 31, 2021, the Afghan Air Force had roughly 100 rotary-wing aircraft.
Even without those advanced avionics systems, some sections of the Afghan military had a plan to use some of those helicopters in the defense of Kabul as the Taliban closed in, but those plans were abandoned once the head of state abandoned his post. From the SIGAR report:
On August 15, 2021, President Ghani boarded a helicopter and fled the country. Some Afghan and U.S. officials believe that Kabul would not have fallen on August 15 had Ghani remained in the capital. One Afghan MD-530 squadron commander told us that he arrived in Kabul on August 14 ready to defend the capital with 12 MD-530 attack helicopters and 17 pilots. However, once President Ghani left, plans for the government’s protection dissolved and self-preservation instincts took over. The squadron commander told SIGAR that as soon as the president left the country, anyone who could fly an aircraft fled to neighboring Tajikistan or Uzbekistan.
The U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction wrote in a February 2023 report that before all U.S. personnel were evacuated from the country the Department of Defense removed or destroyed “26 helicopters, including 6 AH-6s, 4 AH-64Es, 6 MH-60s, 4 UH-60s, 4 CH-47Fs, and 2 MH-47s” at Hamid Karzai International Airport.
In September 2021, the Taliban flew a captured Black Hawk helicopter over Kandahar, a victory lap over the Americans and their allies. But, shockingly, a government made up of brutes and religious extremists is proving less than fully effective at repairing, maintaining, and flying state-of-the-art military aircraft.
It was the latest of at least five verified military aviation accidents recorded since the Taliban seized power in August 2021. All involved helicopters from the previous government’s patchwork fleet of mostly U.S.- and Russian-built aircraft, with pilot error considered the likely causes.
No doubt, there are a lot of Afghans who deserve a hefty share of the blame for the collapse of the legitimate Afghan government, and the Taliban’s relatively easy conquest of Kabul. But decisions of the U.S. government put the Afghans in circumstances where they faced little chance of success against the Taliban. When the Afghan Army is trained by the U.S. and its allies to fight alongside air support, and then the U.S. deliberately disables the capacity of the Afghan air force, it is more than fair to ask what the Biden administration thought would happen.
It’s not just that the U.S. left the free Afghans on their own; it’s that we deliberately chose to leave them with so little capacity to defend themselves against what was coming their way.
One last footnote: In autumn 2022, Malinowski found himself in a tough reelection bid, up against Republican Thomas Kean Jr., the son of the former governor. In October 2022, as the polls showed a tied race, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee effectively abandoned Malinowski, not reserving any television time and spending relatively little money to protect him. Kean defeated Malinowski, 51.4 percent to 48.6 percent.