Bazaars in the Badlands: When Superpowers Leave Behind Undestroyed Weapons

‘Superpowers’ intervening in conflicts have had little concern about the weaponry that they leave behind.

Earlier this year, when terrorists in Kashmir Valley were caught with M4 carbines and M16 assault rifles, something was terribly amiss. These weapons are not part of the Pakistani Army’s standard issue, which uses Heckler and Koch MP5/G3 or the Chinese Type 56, instead.

Clearly, the active Pakistan-based terror groups like Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) had developed alternate sources to the traditional ‘establishment’ (read, Pakistani Army), to arm its rank.

The Badlands of Afghanistan

The thriving new global source or bazaar of deadly weaponry is in the unforgiving badlands of Afghanistan, under the control of the uncontrollable, Taliban.

Awash with a leftover stockpile of arms and munitions worth a staggering $7.12 billion (as per estimates of the US Department of Defense) left by the abandoning US Armed Forces in 2021, the well-greased cartel that once peddled contrabands like opium, heroin, and meth is now the supermarket for cutting-edge wares like night vision goggles, biometric systems, assault rifles with thermal scopes et al.

For a landlocked and essentially pariah nation, the Afghan Taliban have hit upon an inadvertent bounty (recklessly undestroyed by the US) to shore up its coffers. History is repeating itself with US weapons boomeranging in Afghanistan and finding itself in the unsavoury hands of ‘non-state’ actors or simply terrorists, that hit US interests, and those of US allies.

Leaving ‘Leftovers’ That Come Back to Bite

Operation Cyclone (1979-1992), the codename for the CIA-ISI program that entailed supplying and training Afghan mujaheddins with advanced weaponry used against fighting the Soviet Red Army (and its proxies in what was then, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan), haunted the Americans subsequently.

Murmurs of CIA-run Operations like MIAS (Missing in action Stingers) to retrieve the earlier supplied weapons, were not exactly successful. Many weapons supplied by the CIA-ISI duo in the ’80s and early ’90s were pitchforked by the Taliban mujaheddins against the American troops when they returned to Afghanistan in 2001 (Operation Enduring Freedom), post-9/11.

Today, the spoils and residue of the US’s ‘longest war’ (2001-2021), including hardware worth $18.6 billion spent on arming Afghan Security Forces, moved hands to the Afghan Taliban, and from there, to the various conflict zones across the globe, including the Kashmir Valley.

The CIA-ISI operations that had created the regional infrastructure, toxic religiousity, and institutional compromise of governing institutions in Pakistan e.g., ‘establishment’ in the ’80s, were to cost India dearly in the ’90s, when terrorism in the Kashmir Valley, boomed. While questions were repeatedly asked of Pakistan abetting and arming terror groups in Kashmir Valley – somehow the reckless and careless role of the US in leaving behind the mess and infrastructure, was never really asked.

History Bound to Repeat Itself

Again, the portents of the most dangerous and largest unchecked diversion of weaponry in history looms, and the role of the US in leaving behind a grave situation, remains unaccounted. Despite official assurances by the spokesperson for the Pentagon, Lt Col Rob Lodewick, that, “it’s important to remember that nearly all weapons and equipment used by U.S. military forces in Afghanistan were either retrograded or destroyed prior to our withdrawal,” – the undeniable reality suggests, otherwise.

Much before the Americans laid to waste their own weaponry repeatedly, it was the retreating Soviets from Afghanistan in 1988 under General Gromov (Commanding the 40th Division) of the Red Army, that had left behind the curse of killing minefields and lost weapons, in their wake.

As General Gromov had famously walked across the Bridge of Friendship across what was still the border between the USSR and Afghanistan, he had baulked at the TV crew that had tried to interview him. Later he recalled that his frustration and anger had been directed at, “the leadership of the country, at those who start wars while others have to clean up the mess”.

Afghanistan, as the proverbial "Graveyard of Empires", has always been left in the lurch by fleeing empires, whose consequential ghosts have haunted the neighbourhood for a very long time, thereafter.

Irresponsible behaviour of all Superpowers

History is instructive that whenever ‘Superpowers’ have intervened in conflicts, they have been highly irresponsible and unconcerned about the devastating weaponry that they leave behind. For example, despite advance planning et al, the Americans had left behind over $1 billion worth (in 1975 therefore worth many multiples thereof in today’s worth) of tanks, mortars, artillery pieces, planes, armoured personnel carriers, guns etc., as a result of abandoning two-thirds of a nation in the panicky exodus.

The instinct of sheer self-preservation that was seen in the chaotic Da Nang airport in South Vietnam in 1975, was virtually repeated in the shameful midnight slip-out (after switching out the lights) from Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield in 2021. In both instances, the advance of the Taliban and North Vietnam forces respectively, and the sudden capitulation of the native forces left to fend for themselves, was instantaneous and humiliating. The Americans didn’t care then, they don’t really seem to care now.

The desperate rant of American ‘allies’ in South Vietnam had sounded eerily like that of the similarly disappointed Ashraf Ghani dispensation, as the President of South Vietnam, Nguyen Van Thieu, had blasted the Americans, saying:

“Our great ally, [the] leader of the free world…..The United States has not respected its promises…..It is inhumane. It is not trustworthy. It is irresponsible….The United States did not keep its word. Is an American's word reliable these days?” and added, “The United States did not keep its promise to help us fight for freedom and it was in the same fight that the United States lost 50,000 of its young men”.

However, in popular imagination aided immeasurably by Hollywood, the villains of the Vietnam War were singularly the Communist North Vietnamese forces.

Overlooked and uninvestigated war crimes and excesses by the democidal American operations became mere footnotes in History. Gabriel Garcia Marquez described South Vietnam as a ‘False Paradise’ where, “The cost of this delirium was stupefying: 360,000 people mutilated, a million widows, 500,000 prostitutes, 500,000 drug addicts, a million tuberculous and more than a million soldiers of the old regime, impossible to rehabilitate into a new society”.

The wounds didn’t end with the US withdrawal from South Vietnam as the weapons and mayhem that they left behind metastasized a terrible narrative subsequently, just as the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan solved nothing, and just as, the American withdrawal (twice effectively) from Afghanistan has now left the region to its terrible fate.

Weapons of America’s War have repeatedly cost India in the past, and present, and could increasingly do so, in the future, given what has been carelessly abandoned. It is time to question the US about the ‘costs’/responsibilities of its wars, as the leftover invariably finds its footprint in Kashmir Valley, the Middle East, the Central Asian Republic, or even with talk of Vladimir Putin seeking to buy weapons from the cold storage of Afghanistan, for its war in Ukraine. But amidst all this, the US remains unquestioned and unaccounted for – just as the Soviets were afforded, earlier.

(The author is a Former Lt Governor of Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Puducherry. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)