Thursday, September 2, 2021

Damaged Goods Left Behind in Afghanistan

We all like to get new gadgets, buy new vehicles & collect implements that make our lives easier. The shine of a new phone, the smell of a new car & the sound of a new machine always lifts us. However, as someone who spent the last few decades maintaining, repairing & restoring stuff, I am a firm believer that something that doesn’t work when needed, is as good as not there.

After overtaking Afghanistan, the Taliban were delighted to discover the spoils of war. Billions of dollars worth of military equipment left behind by the Americans & allies. From a sheer scale point of view, this made the Taliban the best-equipped terror group in the world. Reality hit when they realized that most of the higher-tech equipment like aircraft, helicopters & other weapon systems were rendered unserviceable before discarding them into the hands of the Taliban. 

While rudimentary small weapons like the Russian AKs hardly need any care, to keep a helicopter air-worthy or a radar/radio mission reliable is a technical & logistical ballet, pretty hard to master. 

One may wonder why anyone will leave such expensive & sophisticated war machinery on their way out of the battle zone, knowing fully well that it will find its way into the hands of the enemy? It all boils down to time & cost. While it took two decades to accumulate the equipment in Afghanistan, the decision to withdraw gave the allies just months to extricate soldiers, material & even afghans who were embedded into the operations. Pakistan had reaped many benefits extracting transit fees from over-land convoys supporting IASF till 2014 & the Americans thereafter, the same routes were not prudent for going back. Faced with the high cost & limited lift capacities of aircraft, it made more sense to leave the equipment behind than to haul it back.

While managing the lifecycle of any equipment, the decision to discard is quantified in terms of the economics of sustainment. Once inducted in the battlefield, the equipment value depreciates with use and if the cost of maintaining the system exceeds half of its residual value, it makes less sense to sustain the system. Media reports are full of coverage on damaged hardware left over by the American forces and how the Taliban must be regretting their premature celebrations on inheriting the latest war toys. As of now, it appears that the Taliban has limited capacity to make these weapon systems fit-for-use, but I would not disregard the ingenuity of self-taught technicians in innovating repairs. They may not be Tony Stark, but the influence of places like Darra Adam Khel is always lurking.

The disintegration of the USSR taught us that weapon stockpiles coupled with crippled economies make perfect targets for weapons trafficking. The situation in Afghanistan & the unfastened control of various Taliban warlords gives a direct pipeline for Pakistan to do what it does best. Export terror. 

At a very broad level, military logistics is a system of activities, capabilities & processes that connect a nation’s economy to the battlefield. The outcome of this process is the establishment of a ‘well’ from which the forces draw their combat potential. It is certainly an expensive well.  Obsessed with ruling through the barrel of a gun, the Taliban leadership will dedicate substantial resources to operationalize the military equipment & infrastructure sidelining national needs expected from governments. It remains to be seen who moves into this business with the Taliban since the real value of any conflict is the debt that it produces. 

The Americans may have lost a big stockpile of hardware, but from a simple cost-benefit, they gained a trouble-free exit while their opposite side was rejoicing the illusion of gains. Smaller weapons that were taken over do not pose any major threat to the west and a peaceful Afghanistan is far too complicated a game. But in the optics of it all, the US not only displaced Russians as the last empire to retreat from Afghanistan but also changed the image of terror from a traditionally dressed man holding an AK-47 to a Taliban in modern combat gear holding an M4. Sometimes we are collateral damage in our war against ourselves.

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