Four years ago, around this Presidents’ Day, Joe Biden was planning his deadly and botched military withdrawal from Afghanistan.
He succeeded after leaving behind 13 dead Americans and billions of dollars in military equipment.
That ignoble 2021 act was the beginning of the end of Biden’s one term failed presidency. Those unnecessary deaths haunted his presidency, if not him.
Four years later President Donald Trump is going to do something about Afghanistan.
Trump, who has obvious disdain for his predecessor—even on Presidents’ Day–can’t do much but honor those young Americans who were blown up in August outside the Kabul airport by a Taliban terrorist during the chaotic withdrawal.
But he can do something about the Taliban who run Afghanistan as well as the $7 billion in military equipment that Biden left behind during his precipitous and hasty retreat. Trump wants that equipment back.
In his war against waste, fraud and abuse in bureaucracies like USAID and others, he has frozen billions in Biden approved humanitarian assistant to Afghanistan, much of which has ended up in the hands of the Taliban.
He also has demanded the return of the military equipment that Biden left behind following Biden’s abandonment of the vast U.S. built military air base in Bagram.
The U.S. has by far been the biggest donor of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. According to the inspector general for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the U.S. has provided some $21 billion in assistance to the Taliban and Afghan refugees since the Taliban took control of the country.
Rather than helping needy Afghans, much of the money has been skimmed off by the Taliban, a terrorist organization, and used to help the Taliban keep control of the country rather than providing food and humanitarian assistance to millions of needy Afghans.
And control the country the Taliban do. Women, for instance, have few, if any, basic rights. They have been denied basic education and are prohibited from showing their faces in public.
One thing is becoming clear as Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk of DOGE go about rooting out waste, fraud and abuse among deep state, big spending Washington bureaucracies.
And that is that Trump does not like the U.S. being ripped off by countries that hate the U.S., let alone being taken to the cleaners by friends and allies.
His world view is not complicated.
If countries, especially anti-American countries, like Afghanistan and others, do not play ball with him, he will not play ball with them.
The abandonment of all that military equipment has bothered Trump for years.
Upon his inaugural Jan. 20 he made it clear that any future financial assistance to Afghanistan will be contingent upon the return of the U,.S. military equipment.
He said, “If we’re going to pay billions of dollars a year, tell them we’re not going to give them money unless they give back our military equipment
The stuff Biden left behind in Afghanistan bogles the mind.
According to the Foundation for Economic Education, the U.S. left behind 22,174 Humvees, 1,000 armored vehicles, 42,000 pickup trucks and SUVs, over 100 helicopters, 33 of which were UH-60 Black Hawks, 64, 363 machine guns, 360,000 assault rifles, 126,295 pistols, 176 artillery pieces, and so on.
The Taliban turns out the Humvees and other U.S. rolling equipment when it holds its in your face victory day celebrations and parades in Kabul.
The issue of the return of the equipment resurfaced last week when the Trump administration successfully recovered seven UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters that Afghan army pilots used to escape the Taliban in 2021.
They flew them to nearby Uzbekistan where they remained until they were recovered and returned after responding to a request by the Trump administration. The Taliban had demanded they be returned to Afghanistan.
Uzbekistan saw it Trump’s way.
The Taliban in Afghanistan will soon see it Trump’s way, too.
Veteran political reporter Peter Lucas can be reached at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com
